Oil Refinery

Oli Refinery

An oil refinery or petroleum refinery is an industrial process plant wherecrude oil is processed and refined into more useful petroleum products, such as gasoline, diesel fuel, asphalt base, heating oil, kerosene, andliquefied petroleum gas.^[1][2] Oil refineries are typically large sprawlingindustrial complexes with extensive piping running throughout, carrying streams of fluids between large chemical processing units. In many ways, oil refineries use much of the technology of, and can be thought of as types of chemical plants. The crude oil feedstock has typically been processed by an oil production plant. There is usually an oil depot (tank farm) at or near an oil refinery for storage of bulk liquid products.

An oil refinery is considered an essential part of the downstream side of thepetroleum industry.

Anacortes Refinery (Tesoro), on the north end of March Point southeast of Anacortes, Washington

Operation

Crude oil is separated into fractions byfractional distillation. The fractions at the top of the fractionating column have lower boiling points than the fractions at the bottom. The heavy bottom fractions are often cracked into lighter, more useful products. All of the fractions are processed further in other refining units.

Raw or unprocessed crude oil is not generally useful. Although "light, sweet" (low viscosity, lowsulfur) crude oil has been used directly as a burner fuel for steam vessel propulsion, the lighter elements form explosive vapors in the fuel tanks and are therefore hazardous, especially inwarships. Instead, the hundreds of different hydrocarbon molecules in crude oil are separated in a refinery into components which can be used as fuels, lubricants, and as feedstock inpetrochemical processes that manufacture such products as plastics, detergents, solvents,elastomers and fibers such as nylon and polyesters.

Petroleum fossil fuels are burned in internal combustion engines to provide power for ships, automobiles, aircraft engines, lawn mowers, chainsaws, and other machines. Different boiling points allow the hydrocarbons to be separated by distillation. Since the lighter liquid products are in great demand for use in internal combustion engines, a modern refinery will convert heavyhydrocarbons and lighter gaseous elements into these higher value products.

The oil refinery in Haifa, Israel is capable of processing about 9 million tons (66 million barrels) of crude oil a year. Its two cooling towers are landmarks of the city's skyline.

Oil can be used in a variety of ways because it contains hydrocarbons of varying molecular masses, forms and lengths such as paraffins, aromatics,naphthenes (or cycloalkanes), alkenes, dienes, andalkynes. While the molecules in crude oil include different atoms such as sulfur and nitrogen, the hydrocarbons are the most common form of molecules, which are molecules of varying lengths and complexity made of hydrogen and carbon atoms, and a small number of oxygen atoms. The differences in the structure of these molecules account for their varying physical and chemical properties, and it is this variety that makes crude oil useful in a broad range of applications.

Once separated and purified of any contaminants and impurities, the fuel or lubricant can be sold without further processing. Smaller molecules such as isobutane and propylene or butylenes can be recombined to meet specific octane requirements by processes such as alkylation, or less commonly, dimerization. Octane grade of gasoline can also be improved by catalytic reforming, which involves removing hydrogen from hydrocarbons producing compounds with higher octane ratings such as aromatics. Intermediate products such as gasoils can even be reprocessed to break a heavy, long-chained oil into a lighter short-chained one, by various forms of cracking such as fluid catalytic cracking,thermal cracking, and hydrocracking. The final step in gasoline production is the blending of fuels with different octane ratings, vapor pressures, and other properties to meet product specifications.

Oil refineries are large scale plants, processing about a hundred thousand to several hundred thousand barrels of crude oil a day. Because of the high capacity, many of the units operate continuously, as opposed to processing in batches, at steady state or nearly steady state for months to years. The high capacity also makes process optimization and advanced process control very desirable.

[edit]Major products

Petroleum products are usually grouped into three categories: light distillates (LPG, gasoline, naphtha), middle distillates (kerosene, diesel), heavy distillates and residuum (heavy fuel oil, lubricating oils, wax, asphalt). This classification is based on the way crude oil is distilled and separated into fractions (called distillates and residuum) as in the above drawing.^[2]

• Liquified petroleum gas (LPG)
• Gasoline (also known as petrol)
• Naphtha
• Kerosene and related jet aircraft fuels
• Diesel fuel
• Fuel oils
• Lubricating oils
• Paraffin wax
• Asphalt and tar
• Petroleum coke

[edit]Common process units found in a refinery

• Desalter unit washes out salt from the crude oil before it enters the atmospheric distillation unit.
• Atmospheric distillation unit distills crude oil into fractions. See Continuous distillation.
• Vacuum distillation unit further distills residual bottoms after atmospheric distillation.
• Naphtha hydrotreater unit uses hydrogen to desulfurize naphtha from atmospheric distillation. Must hydrotreat the naphtha before sending to a Catalytic Reformer unit.
• Catalytic reformer unit is used to convert the naphtha-boiling range molecules into higher octane reformate (reformer product). The reformate has higher content of aromatics and cyclic hydrocarbons). An important byproduct of a reformer is hydrogen released during the catalyst reaction. The hydrogen is used either in the hydrotreaters or the hydrocracker.
• Distillate hydrotreater unit desulfurizes distillates (such as diesel) after atmospheric distillation.
• Fluid catalytic cracker (FCC) unit upgrades heavier fractions into lighter, more valuable products.
• Hydrocracker unit uses hydrogen to upgrade heavier fractions into lighter, more valuable products.
• Visbreaking unit upgrades heavy residual oils by thermally cracking them into lighter, more valuable reduced viscosity products.
• Merox unit treats LPG, kerosene or jet fuel by oxidizing mercaptans to organic disulfides.
• Coking units (delayed coking, fluid coker, and flexicoker) process very heavy residual oils into gasoline and diesel fuel, leaving petroleum coke as a residual product.
• Alkylation unit produces high-octane component for gasoline blending.
• Dimerization unit converts olefins into higher-octane gasoline blending components. For example, butenes can be dimerized into isooctene which may subsequently be hydrogenated to form isooctane. There are also other uses for dimerization.
• Isomerization unit converts linear molecules to higher-octane branched molecules for blending into gasoline or feed to alkylation units.
• Steam reforming unit produces hydrogen for the hydrotreaters or hydrocracker.
• Liquified gas storage units store propane and similar gaseous fuels at pressure sufficient to maintain them in liquid form. These are usually spherical vessels or bullets (horizontal vessels with rounded ends.
• Storage tanks store crude oil and finished products, usually cylindrical, with some sort of vapor emission control and surrounded by an earthen berm to contain spills.
• Slug catcher used when product (crude oil and gas) that comes from a pipeline with two-phase flow, has to be buffered at the entry of the units.
• Amine gas treater, Claus unit, and tail gas treatment convert hydrogen sulfide from hydrodesulfurization into elemental sulfur.
• Utility units such as cooling towers circulate cooling water, boiler plants generates steam, and instrument air systems include pneumatically operated control valves and an electrical substation.
• Wastewater collection and treating systems consist of API separators, dissolved air flotation (DAF) units and further treatment units such as an activated sludge biotreater to make water suitable for reuse or for disposal.^[3]
• Solvent refining units use solvent such as cresol or furfural to remove unwanted, mainly asphaltenic materials from lubricating oil stock or diesel stock.
• Solvent dewaxing units remove the heavy waxy constituents petrolatum from vacuum distillation products.

[edit]Flow diagram of typical refinery

The image below is a schematic flow diagram of a typical oil refinery that depicts the various unit processes and the flow of intermediate product streams that occurs between the inlet crude oil feedstock and the final end products. The diagram depicts only one of the literally hundreds of different oil refinery configurations. The diagram also does not include any of the usual refinery facilities providing utilities such as steam, cooling water, and electric power as well as storage tanks for crude oil feedstock and for intermediate products and end products.^[1][4][5][6]

Schematic flow diagram of a typical oil refinery

There are many process configurations other than that depicted above. For example, the vacuum distillation unit may also produce fractions that can be refined into endproducts such as: spindle oil used in the textile industry, light machinery oil, motor oil, and steam cylinder oil. As another example, the vacuum residue may be processed in a coker unit to produce petroleum coke.