Improvement of fuel quality by oxidative desulfurization: Design of synthetic catalyst for the process

Abstract

The present study explored a novel oxidative desulfurization (ODS) method of light gas oil fuel, which combines a catalytic oxidation step of the dibenzothiophene compound directly in the presence of molecular air as oxidant to obtain high quality fuel for light gas oil.In chemical industries and industrial research, catalysis plays a significant role. Heightened concerns for cleaner air together with stricter environmental legislations on sulfur content in addition to fulfill economic have created a driving force for the improvement of more efficient technologies and motivating an intensive research on new oxidative catalysts. As the lower quality fuel becomes more abundant, additional challenges arise such as more severe operation conditions leading to higher corrosion of the refinery installations, catalyst deactivation and poisoning. Therefore, among the technologies to face these challenges is to develop catalysts that can be applied economically under moderate conditions.The objective of this work is to design a suitable synthetic catalyst for oxidative desulfurization (ODS) of light gas oil (LGO) containing model sulfur compound (dibenzothiophene (DBT)) using air as oxidant and operating under different but moderate operating conditions. The impregnation method is used to characterize two homemade catalysts, cobalt oxide (Co3O4/γ-Al2O3) and manganese oxide (MnO2/γ-Al2O3). The prepared catalysts showed that the manganese oxide has a good impregnation (MnO2=13%), good pore size distribution and larger surface area. A set of experiments related to ODS of dibenzothiophene has been carried out in a continuous flow isothermal trickle bed reactor using light gas oil as a feedstock utilizing both catalysts prepared in-house. At constant pressure of 2bar and with different initial concentrations of sulfur within dibenzothiophene, the temperature of the process was varied from 403K to 473K and the liquid hourly space velocity (LHSV) was varied from 1 to 3h−1. The results showed that an increase in reaction temperature and decreasing in LHSV, higher conversion was obtained.Although both catalysts showed excellent catalytic performance on the removal of molecule sulfur compound from light gas oil, the catalyst MnO2 catalyst exhibited higher conversion than Co3O4 catalyst at the same process operating conditions.