AM-99-11 THE INTEGRATION OF SOLVENT DEASPHALTING AND FCC PROCESS: A HIGHLY COMPETITIVE CHOICE FOR RESIDUE CONVERSION

Description:

Among all the products of the oil industry, fuel oil has been the most easily replaced by non-refining industry derivatives. Due to this fact, all the refining R&D Centers have put a lot of effort in developing residue conversion processes. As a result of this great effort in the last 30 years, today the refining industry can choose from a huge portfolio of residue conversion processes, some of them commercially proven. Unfortunately all these processes have a high capital requirement that makes it difficult to achieve a reasonable payout for the investment, especially in the present days of low refining margin and low crude prices. In this context, the most widely used residue conversion processes have been the two processes developed in the first half of this century, the Delayed Coking and the Solvent Deasphalting process. Both the technological development of the Solvent Deasphalting process, from the sixties up to now, and how the PETROBRAS R&D Center (CENPES) has participated in this effort are discussed. Most of PETROBRAS old units have been redesigned to improve the product yields and to minimize the energy consumption. PETROBRAS moved from the simple effect solvent recovery system to the supercritical recovery system passing by an intermediate high efficiency double effect recovery system applied in a huge CENPES-designed grass root unit of 38000 BPD of vacuum residue in operation at our S. José dos Campos refinery since 1989. Lower investment needs and the low operational cost of the new PETROBRAS Advanced Supercritical Solvent Deasphalting Process PASDSC, mainly if integrated with the PETROBRAS Fluid Catalytic Cracking technology with advanced converter, PACRC, results in an economic advantage, also shown.