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Upgrading heavy hydrocarbon oils

a technology of hydrocarbon oil and heavy oil, which is applied in the direction of hydrocarbon oil refining, petroleum industry, water treatment, etc., can solve the problems of difficult to bring remote, heavy oil resources closer, and the oil produced from a significant number of oil reserves around the world is simply too heavy to flow under ambient conditions,

Inactive Publication Date: 2009-07-02
CHEVROU USA INC
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  • Summary
  • Abstract
  • Description
  • Claims
  • Application Information

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

Oil produced from a significant number of oil reserves around the world is simply too heavy to flow under ambient conditions.
This makes it challenging to bring remote, heavy oil resources closer to the markets.
These diluent addition / removal processes and hydrogen-addition or other upgrading processes have a number of disadvantages:1. The infrastructure required for the handling, recovery, and recycle of diluent could be expensive, especially over long distances.
Diluent availability is another potential issue.2. Hydrogen-addition processes such as hydrotreating or hydrocracking require significant investments in capital and infrastructure.3. Hydrogen-addition processes also have high operating costs, since hydrogen production costs are highly sensitive to natural gas prices.
Some remote heavy oil reserves may not even have access to sufficient quantities of low-cost natural gas to support a hydrogen plant.
These hydrogen-addition processes also generally require expensive catalysts and resource intensive, catalyst handling techniques, including catalyst regeneration.4. In some cases, the refineries and / or upgrading facilities that are located closest to the production site may have neither the capacity nor the facilities to accept the heavy oil.5. Coking is often used at refineries or upgrading facilities.
Significant amounts of by-product solid coke are rejected during the coking process, leading to lower liquid hydrocarbon yield.
In addition, the liquid products from, a coking plant often need further hydrotreating.

Method used

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  • Upgrading heavy hydrocarbon oils
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Examples

Experimental program
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example 1

Heavy Oil Upgrading Using Emulsion Mixing

[0053]The experiment was performed using a continuous system. A feed oil, which was a heavy crude with API=12.8, which was diluted with a diluent hydrocarbon at a ratio of 5:1 (20 vol % of diluent) and water was heated to 150° C. before entering a micromixer. The heated crude was mixed with water in the micromixer to form a water-oil emulsion, which was injected into a stream of supercritical water at temperature of 400° C. The total water to oil ratio (volume at room temperature) was 3:1. The oil-supercritical water mixture was then injected into a reactor at temperature of 400° C. and pressure, of 3400 psig. The upgraded product, which formed a homogeneous phase with supercritical water, was withdrawn from the top of the reactor and send to high pressure separator which was operated at the same pressure but lower temperature to achieve oil-water separation. The dreg stream was removed from reactor bottom.

[0054]The diluted heavy crude oil pr...

example 2

Reference Run Using In-Line Mixer

[0056]In order to demonstrate the improved performance by using emulsion mixing, a reference run using in-line mixer to mix water and oil was performed under the same operation conditions (temperature, pressure, water to oil ratio). Feed oil (diluted heavy crude of Example 1) was preheated to 130 C, and then mixed with supercritical water in an inline mixer. Water-oil stream flow through a 20 ft spiral coil immersed in a high temperature sand bath (same as reactor temperature) to further improve water-oil contact, and then fed to the reactor. The upgraded product, which formed a homogeneous phase with supercritical water, was withdrawn from the top of the reactor and send to high pressure separator which was operated at the same pressure but lower temperature to achieve oil-water separation. The dreg stream was removed from reactor bottom.

[0057]The liquid product (syncrude) from this reference run has the following properties: 22 API gravity at 60 / 60...

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Abstract

A process using supercritical water-oil emulsion to upgrade a heavy hydrocarbon feedstock into an upgraded hydrocarbon product or syncrude with highly desirable properties (low sulfur content, low metals content, lower density (higher API), lower viscosity, lower residuum content, etc.) is disclosed. The process does not require external supply of hydrogen nor does it use externally supplied catalysts.

Description

FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0001]The present invention relates to upgrading of heavy hydrocarbons such as whole heavy oil, bitumen, and the like using supercritical water.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]Oil produced from a significant number of oil reserves around the world is simply too heavy to flow under ambient conditions. This makes it challenging to bring remote, heavy oil resources closer to the markets. One typical example is the Hamaca field in Venezuela. In order to render such heavy oils flowable, one of the most common methods known in the art is to reduce the viscosity and density by mixing the heavy oil with a sufficient diluent. The diluent may be naphtha, or any other stream with a significantly higher API gravity (i.e., much lower density) than the heavy oil.[0003]For a case such as Hamaca, diluted crude oil is sent from the production wellhead via pipeline to an upgrading facility. Two key operations occur at the upgrading facility: (1) the diluent stream is recovered ...

Claims

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Application Information

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Patent Type & Authority Applications(United States)
IPC IPC(8): C10G31/00
CPCC10G31/08
Inventor LI, LINMONTESI, ALBERTORHYNE, LEE D.HE, ZUNQUING
Owner CHEVROU USA INC
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