98/00178 Preparing and handling coal-water slurry fuels: potential problems and solutions

Abstract

Environmentally driven regulations are requiring continuous and significant changes in diesel fuel quality in many parts of the world. Further tightening of specifications are being considered for the future, with trends to lower density, sulphur, and distillation end point, as well as higher cetane number, to meet with more stringent levels of new motor power and environmental regulations.Hydroprocessing is extensively practised in petroleum industry to upgrade fuels refinery streams. In this paper, pilot plant data is presented of a moderate pressure technology developed to produce diesel fuel comply with actual and near future environmental regulations using feedstocks since medium to high contaminants content. This technology is based on Co-Mo and Ni-Mo γ-alumina supported proprietary catalysts, with high activity to sulphur and aromatics compounds commonly encountered in these petroleum fractions. Discussion will be driven to show the effect of process conditions on product quality and mains difference in catalysts performance. A series of Isthmus/Maya crude oils mixtures was prepared to test catalyst efficiency, but for the sake of explicitness, only three of these are reported in this work. Hydrodesulphurisation and hydrodenitrogenation activities are quite similar in both catalysts, but aromatic saturation is much more effective in Ni-Mo version. This fact is important when domestic refineries make more intensive use of light cycle oil as a mix component in the feedstock to fulfil demand.