Residual steams are becoming orphans in the refinery. As shown in Figure 1, the demand for these heavy streams has fallen to about 5% of the crude barrel. When the price of crude oil was lower, these streams were sent to power plants. Future regulations on sulfur levels in fuel oils will require desulfurization of resids before they can be consumed. The growth of resid hydroprocessing is shown in Figure2. This technology not only produces salable heavy liquid products but also can yield a very suitable feed for a fluid catalytic cracking process. The change in properties of several residual feeds after hydroprocessing is shown in Table1. Conradson Carbons of 6 wt% or less are easily handled, and contaminate metals are reduced to levels that can be handled with reasonable amounts of today’s FCC catalysts.
展开▼
