Laboratory Investigation of E-Beam Heavy Oil Upgrading

Abstract

Electron beam (E-Beam) heavy oil upgrading, which uses unique features of electron beam irradiation, can be a solution to minimize the critical problem of upgrading heavy oil. Enormous amounts of heavy oil reserves exist in the world, but the lack of cost-effective technologies hinders the development of heavy oil reserves. One of the critical problems of heavy oil or bitumen is that it takes large amounts of thermal energy and expensive catalysts to upgrade. E-Beam processing will allow lowering the thermal energy and sharply reduce the investment in catalysts. The design can be simpler and will contribute to lowering the production and transportation cost of heavy oil and bitumen. Introduction One of the greatest challenges facing our continued use of petroleum in the global economy, as we transition to a balanced use various energy sources, is that the largest remaining reserves of petroleum are made of large and difficult-to-upgrade molecules. For example, three oil sand areas (Abthabasca, Cold Lake, and Peace River) in Canada contain as much as 172.2 billion bbl of remaining estimated reserves (Elliot 2008). However, fundamental limitations of current extraction, refining, and upgrading technologies limit production and development to 1% of heavy oil deposits worldwide (Yan 2002; Dickenson 1997). Minimum upgrading implies reducing the oil viscosity without adding costly solvents to facilitate transportation. The most severe and common upgrading is breaking down heavier molecules to obtain higher quality products such as gas oil and gasoline, and it requires a substantial amount of thermal energy and expensive catalysts. Current upgrading methods based on thermo-catalytic-cracking (TCC) require very large capital investments, high operating costs, and vast and complex facilities, and they experience chronic bottlenecks and unused capacities. The biggest limitation is that any TCC-based upgrading requires about one third of the energy produced for processing in the form of steam and heat (Zussupov 2006; Raseev 2003). Since the mid 1920s, the research on radiation chemistry of hydrocarbons has been conducted by many laboratories all over the world. In 1965, Salvoy and Falconer showed that using n-C16 with VDG E-Beam generator and gamma ray radiation the effects of irradiation of n-hexadecane are apparently independent of source and dose rate. Two researchers using a viscous, highly aromatic, low paraffin (1.5%), high sulfur (2%), high metal content crude under a very high dose rate (1~4KGy/s) for radiation thermal cracking experiment, Zaykin et al. (2001, 2002, 2004) observed significant effect of E-Beam irradiation on the hydrocarbons that they used. However, their reports lack information such as description of the experimental procedure, dose calibration, and sample etc. Furthermore, their samples were common to Kazakhstan and the Caspian area and might not produce similar results in other fluids. Therefore, to establish a rigorous relationship of cause effect in radiation experiment, it requires well-defined oil samples. In this study, we extensively investigated radiation effects on hydrocarbons to resolve these unknowns and ambiguity of experimental results of previous works. To accurately analyze the fundamental behavior of E-beam radiation on hydrocarbon, we studied; pure n-hexadecane, a naphtha cut which is a combination of well-defined hydrocarbon group, and asphaltene to see the radiation effect on heavy and very viscous components. The distillation time for hexadecane under our radiation experiment is significantly shorter than for the nonradiation experiment which may indicate a new reaction was caused by electron beam radiation which helped distill it faster. The higher vapor temperature profile of our naphtha radiation experiment indicates the presence of an exothermic reaction generated by electron beam irradiation. The most interesting result got from the asphaltene experiment indicates that C-C bond cleavage was enhanced by radiation thermal cracking. These experimental results give us strong confidence for application of E-Beam technology on E&P industry.

Simultaneous Application of Heat and Electron Particles to Effectively Reduce the Viscosity of Heavy Deasphalted Petroleum Fluids

“…From an economical perspective, some authors reported radiation methods to be more favorable compared to catalytic processes. , More specifically, Yang et al showed that electron beam irradiation, when performed in an industrial scale, could decrease the upgrading cost by 31%. They also suggested a practical design to use electron irradiation in dynamic flow processing units to upgrade heavy fluids in pipelines . In another work, Yang et al coupled heat transfer and radiation Monte Carlo simulation to model electron beam upgrading process of multiphase and single-phase hydrocarbons.…”