Process Engineering Fundamentals

1. Crude Oil

-Crude oil: the term for “unprocessed” oil, the stuff that comes out of the ground. It is also known as petroleum. Crude oil is a fossil fuel, meaning that it was made naturally from decaying plants and animals living in ancient seas millions of years ago anywhere you find crude oil was once a sea bed. Crude oils vary in color, from clear to tar-black, and in viscosity, from water to almost solid.
-Crude oils are such a useful starting point for so many different substances because they contain hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are molecules that contain hydrogen and carbon and come in various lengths and structures, from straight chains to branching chains to rings.
-There are two things that make hydrocarbons exciting to chemists:

a.Hydrocarbons contain a lot of energy.
b.Hydrocarbons can take on many different forms.

b1.The smallest hydrocarbon is methane (CH4), which is a gas that is a lighter than air
b2.Longer chains with 5 or more carbons are liquids
b3.Very long chains are solids like wax or tar
b4.By chemically cross-linking hydrocarbon chains you can get everything from synthetic rubber to nylon to the plastic in tupperware

-The problem with crude oil is that it contains hundreds of different types of hydrocarbons all mixed together. You have to separate the different types of hydrocarbons to have anything useful. Fortunately there is an easy way to separate things, and this is what oil refining is all about.
-Different hydrocarbon chain lengths all have progressively higher boiling points, so they can all be separated by distillation. This is what happens in an oil refinery – in one part of the process, crude oil is heated and the different chains are pulled out by their vaporization temperatures. Each different chain length has a different property that makes it useful in a different way.

2. Process Units

-Crude Distillation Unit (CDU)
-Residue Fluid Catalytic Cracking Unit (RFCC)
-LPG Merox
-Propylene Recovery Unit (PRU)
-InAlk Unit
-Distillate Unionfining Process (DHDS)
-Amine Regeneration Unit (ARU)
-Sour Water Stripper Unit (SWS)
-Sulfur Recovery Unit (SRU)
-Tail gas Treating Unit (TGU)
-Sulfur Granulation and Packaging Unit (SGPU)
-Hydrogen Generation Unit (HGU)

3. Refinery Final Products

-Excess Off Gas
-Fuel Gas
-Propylene
-LPG
-Straight Run Naphtha
-Sulfur
-Regular Gasoline (RON 90)
-Premium Gasoline (RON95)
-FCC Gasoline
-Aviation Fuel or Jet Fuel
-Gas Oil
-Fuel Oil

Tagged with: CDU • distillation • process • refining

Filed under: Process/Material

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