9 replies to this topic

[Resman]

I have searched much about operating conditions of fuel oil hydrodesulfurization unit but I have not been successful. If you know, Please help me!

Thank you in advance.

[Himanshu Sharma]

Depends on Feed to HDS and the product quality specifications.

[JMW]

For residual/heavy fuel oils I doubt you'll find much at all.
The cost of desulphurising residuum to produce low sulphur fuel oils was a nonstarted from the start.
The refiners made it clear that it made no commercial sense to invest that sort of money into fuel oil when they could get a far better retrun on investment elsewhere.
Heavy fuel oils and intermediate fuel oils are produced by blending residuum with low value/quality distillates to meet ISO 8217 standards.
Residuum is the waste product from the various refinery processes to produce valuable refined products.
The refiners can make money from the resid by blending into fuel oil. But low sulphur regulations mean that much of the resid will be now converted to other uses but not desulphurisation.

[Technical Bard]

There are units in the world hydroprocessing residuum, but they do not reach "low sulfur specs" by any normal measure. They are used to hydrocrack the residuum and do bulk metal/nitrogen/sulfur removal. These units generally operate above 150 bar with reactor temperatures above 400°C in order to achieve the cracking. The cracked naphtha, distillate and heavy gas oil products usually require further hydrotreating to meet commercial specs. Unconverted material from such a residuum hydrocracking is usually too unstable or still too sour to meet the specifications for heavy fuel oil (although sometimes it is blended as such). Some facilities route the unconverted material to a coker or gasifier to dispose of it.

[Himanshu Sharma]

@Technical Bard

Sir,

are you referring to Slurry Hydrocracker (ebullated bed reactor ) type of hydroprocessing scheme?

[Technical Bard]

Himanshu,

Most of them are slurry/ebullated bed units - there are a few fixed bed (ARDS / VRDS) units in operation, but they are generally limited on CCR and metals content of the feed. PDVSA is apparently going to build an HDH fixed bed resid hydrocracker in the near future.

[Vigneshwar]

Me Too searching in same topic ( Hydroprocessing of Fuel oils) ,but didn't found any fruitful results. In general it is being used as a fuel to generate . If u know any process and Licensor kindly post it .Here fuel oil strictly means , the bottoms of FCC, Visbreaker and Delayed coker.
Thank You.

[Technical Bard]

Licensors for these processes include Axens (H-Oil), CB&I Lummus (LC-Fining), UOP (Uniflex), ENI (EST), PDVSA (HDH).

[AzoTik1985]

Uniflex (UOP) doesn't have production unit. Chevron also has process LC-MAX. It is conbination LC-Fining and solvent deasphalting (SDA).

[Technical Bard]

UOP Uniflex doesn't currently have an operating unit. However, the original CANMET unit on which this technology is based ran for many years at the Petro-Canada (now Suncor) refinery in Montreal, Canada. UOP should have access to all of the data gathered in the many years and many experiments that were run on that unit.