Challenges and Solutions for Shale Oil Upgrading

摘要

The nature of raw shale oil presents some significant challenges that must be addressed before finding a workable solution for upgrading shale oil into finished transportation fuel. Some of the key challenges involve high concentrations of heteroatomic compounds, unsaturates, and arsenic, as well as issues with particu-lates, and potential plugging problems due to oxygen exposure during retorting. UOP has significant experience in development and operation of shale oil upgrading technology, dating back to the operation of the Unocal plant at Parachute Creek, Colorado. Since then, UOP has continued development aimed at further improvements to product upgrading technology, resulting in an enhanced understanding of the removal of contaminants such as arsenic and particulates, and advanced hydro-processing configurations to produce high-quality ultra-low-sulfur distillates and gasoline. This paper will provide an overview of the Parachute Creek operation, a summary of key lessons learned from that experience, and fast forward to development work conducted recently to support proposed commercial shale oil operations. In addition, an interesting application of this technology for upgrading of raw shale oil to high-quality fuel in a future commercial plant for Viru Keemia Grupp (VKG) in Estonia will be discussed. The characteristics of this Estonian shale oil and the project's production goals provided some interesting challenges for the development of process configurations for this project. The combination of UOP's experience base and new technology development plus VKG's ninety years of experience in shale oil production has resulted in an effective and robust solution.