Conversion of Heavy Hydrocarbons into Lighter Hydrocarbons

During the Summer 1998 our company has recovered almost whole abandoned experimental set up (reactor, pumps, pipes, power supplies, etc.) of Dr. Pierre Jorgensen who some years earlier studied at the University of Orleans (in the frame of his Ph.D. thesis) his conversion process of Heavy Oils into Lighter ones. At that time some of the present ECP associates helped Pierre… Having in mind the advantages of Pierre's technology we strongly encouraged him to continue his activity – this time in cooperation with a small Texan company. Fortunately, such a three-partner relation was established so that in December 1998 ECP was able to put together all set that up in our facility. In the period of 1999-2000 we performed, with Pierre, quite long series of tests of such Heavy Oil upgrading process at a ½ barrel per day pilot. The process, called CPJ, is based on an instantaneous transfer of energy from superheated steam to a fine mist of the heavy oil (that can contain a lot of Sulfur) as an alternative to conventional refinery “bottom of the barrel” processing that converts heavy oils to lighter crude oils. Typical upgrading methods use expensive hydrogen and/or exotic catalysts.

On the contrary, the tested CPJ process is non-catalytic, does not involve use of hydrogen, and is completely driven by heat provided from outside. This process is based upon an instantaneous thermal shock concept. The pressurized feed is preheated to just-below the conditions for its natural thermal cracking and then activated by thermal-mechanical energy transferred from a jet of superheated and pressurized steam. Then such very high-speed mixture then returns to thermodynamic steady state in a soaker, giving stable end products with minimum residence time at moderate pressures. Conventional separation is made and heavy ends are recycled back to the reactor. The separators produce both recycle streams and final products. The first separator removes the poly-aromatic pitch fraction, which can be used to fuel the process. The ECP's tests results have demonstrated the potential of the process. ECP's pilot was then relocated to Calgary, Alberta.

Much earlier (since 1992) some of ECP associates have already studied the feasibility of cold plasma-assisted conversion of heavy residues of French petroleum industry into lighter fractions. The study has shown that the stream of molecular or atomic Hydrogen produced in GlidArc-I cannot be inserted to heavy hydrocarbon structure. Some of our tests indicated that rather an Oxygen-containing gas should be locally used to produce a highly active reaction zone in which a heavy feed partially burns to steam and CO₂, partially reforms to H₂ and CO, partially cracks to lighter fractions, and partially reacts with in site produced H₂, CO, CO₂, and H₂O. We were just opening a new, oxidizing way of heavy oil processing … but that way did not get any support of the French petroleum community.

These future ECP associates have been developing the concept and finally brought it to ECP. The further development was performed in a bench scale "quasi-adiabatic" (QA) electrically assisted reactor. Very interesting results were obtained so that the QA reactors and processes (called MAC) are the subject of a French patent.

Our new MAC process (ECP) is one-step process at atmospheric pressure. We mostly run the process in order to produce as much as possible of the light gaseous HC and syngas as a fuel for micro-turbines and other applications. Accordingly, the process can be described as follows:

Heavy Oil + Air = Hydrocarbon Gas + CO + H₂+ e CO₂ + e H₂O +e H₂S + e Lighter Oil

The process is performed in unique and compact QA (slightly exothermic) reactor as it can be schematically shown below.

The energy (heat) to run the whole MAC process is provided by an "internal-burning" of a part of the initial Heavy Oil. While some "lost" part of Carbon and Hydrogen has no use (CO₂ and water) the other part is converted to a Hydrocarbon Gas and Syngas (CO + H₂). This fuel gas can, for example, run a micro-turbine to provide electric energy for the Heavy Oil mining or be almost totally converted to SynGas for Fuel Cell feeding.

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