Summary and Final Tasks

Summary

Finishing processes make sure that the refinery products fully comply with the commercial specifications and environmental regulations. Hydrotreatment removes heteroatoms from intermediate refinery products to protect the catalysts in the subsequent processes, or from final products to be sent out to the market. A particular challenge for hydrotreatment is that while the crude oil slate is getting more contaminated, the demand for cleaner fuels is mandated by the increasingly stringent environmental regulations. Major hydrotreatment processes include hydrodesulfurization, hydrodenitrogenation, and hydrodemetallation, all using hydrogen and specially designed catalysts to remove heteroatoms with minimal change to the hydrocarbon constitution of petroleum products. Product blending as a major finishing process takes up the challenge of the optimum allocation of many intermediate streams in the refinery to make up the refinery products to satisfy all performance parameters and environmental mandates. Product blending is carried out using linear and non-linear programming techniques for online blending.

Learning Outcomes

You should now be able to:

• compare hydrogenation and hydrotreatment with respect to process goals, catalysis, and chemistry;
• categorize and evaluate HDS, HDN, and HDM processes;
• assess hydrotreatment catalysts, kinetics, and process configurations;
• demonstarate procedures to calculate critical properties of blended products, e.g., octane number, pour point, and viscosity.

Reminder - Complete all of the Lesson 9 tasks

You have reached the end of Lesson 9! Double-check the to-do list below to make sure you have completed all of the activities listed there before you begin Lesson 10.

Questions?

If you have any questions, please post them to our Help Discussion Forum (not email), located in Canvas. I will check that discussion forum daily to respond. While you are there, feel free to post your own responses if you, too, are able to help out a classmate.