No abstract

Crude oil and refinery products are transported worldwide to meet human energy needs. During transportation via pipeline, huge pumping power is required to overcome the frictional pressure drop and the associated drag along the pipeline. The reduction of both is of great interest to industry and academia. Highly expensive ultrahigh molecular weight (UHMW, MW a million Dalton) drag reducing polymers (DRPs) are currently used to address this problem. The present paper, therefore, emphasizes particularly the development of a high-performance catalyst system that synthesizes DRPs (using higher alpha-olefins)—a highly promising cost reduction alternative. This homogeneous catalyst system features a new concept that uses a cost-effective titanium-based Ziegler–Natta precatalyst and a cocatalystLewis base complex having both steric hindrance (around N heteroatom) and electronic effect. This novel work, which involves precatalyst–cocatalyst molecular separation and cocatalystmonophenyl amine association-dissociation phenomena, already generated several US patents. The subject catalyst prepares UHMW DRPs at room temperature, avoiding the use of zero and sub-zero temperatures. The resulting product almost tripled the rate of transportation of a selected grade of refinery product and saved about 50% pumping energy at ppm level pipeline concentration. It is also very easily soluble. Hence, massive modification of existing pipeline will be unnecessary. This will save additional infrastructure cost. This paper also summarizes challenges facing the development of improved heterogeneous catalysts, dispersed polymerization process, molecular simulation-based DRP product formulation, and model/theory of turbulent mixing and dispersion in the transportation pipeline setting.

This paper reports the production of syngas from two types of O 2-assisted dry reforming of propane, namely oxidative (O 2-dosed) dry reforming (ODR) and dry (CO 2-dosed) partial oxidation (DPOX). Reaction runs were conducted over alumina-supported bimetallic Co-Ni promoted with CeO 2 at 120 kPa and 793-893 K. Ceria promotion improved the carbon deposition resilience of the Co-Ni catalyst. Physicochemical attributes were obtained from liquid N 2 adsorption, H 2 chemisorption and temperature-programmed desorption runs for NH 3 , CO 2 , CH 4 and C 3 H 8. Rate behavior under ODR, DPOX and pure dry reforming could be described consistently with empirical models that are structurally similar to Langmuir-Hinshelwood type relations. Inferences from these models allowed the postulation of the same overall reaction network for the three types of reactions albeit with variation in rate-controlling steps depending on the different product species. On the whole, DPOX seemed to be a superior option for the manufacturing of syngas for downstream olefin FT production due to reduced variability in the H 2 :CO ratio and the closeness to unity (0.72-0.95) of the exiting syngas over the range of O 2 partial pressure used.