Simultaneous breaking and conversion of petroleum emulsions into synthetic crude oil with low impurities

Simultaneous breaking and conversion of petroleum emulsions into synthetic crude oil with low impurities

Asphaltenes

Crude oil

Demulsification

Gasoline

Ostwald ripening

Petroleum refineries

Effluent treatment

Supercritical fluids

Deuterium compounds

An environmentally-benign supercritical fluid route is developed to demulsify and treat highly intractable petroleum emulsions containing hazardous acidic compounds, heavy fractions, heteroatoms, and metallic impurities without using external catalysts and molecular hydrogen. The produced synthetic crude oil exhibits asphaltene-free fractions with low amounts of impurities, which could be suitable for use in current petroleum refineries. The degree of reductions of asphaltenes and non-distillate fraction are 98.5% and 94.0%, respectively. The deacidification tendency of supercritical methanol results in 90.2% reduction of total acid number. Ni, Ca, and N are removed below detection limits (0.1ppm for Ni/Ca and 0.01wt% for N). V and S are reduced with efficiency of 85.0% and 33.6%, respectively. 2017 Elsevier Ltd

135-144

199

Fuel

2017

Khan, Muhammad Kashif

Sarkar, Bipul

Zeb, Hassan

Yi, Minhoe

Kim, Jaehoon

journalArticle

162361

10.1016/j.fuel.2017.02.070