LAUSR

Upgrading and refining of heavy oil and bitumen has become a costly practice in the last decades, creating a need for new processes to appropriately convert these heavy feedstocks into lighter and more valuable materials. Solvent deasphalting (SDA) is a carbon rejection process where asphaltenes are removed from the oil using a paraffinic solvent, producing a lighter deasphalted oil (DAO) stream that can be further upgraded without the limitations of asphaltene instabilities. In this work, upgrading via thermal cracking of deasphalted vacuum residue was assessed in a bench scale pilot plant equipped with an up-flow open tubular reactor. Two different feedstocks were evaluated: recycled and virgin DAO. Reactivity experiments were carried out at temperatures within the interval 380–423 °C and liquid hourly space velocities (LHSV) of 0.25–3 h–1. The effects of operating pressure and steam partial pressure on the thermal crackability of DAO were also evaluated as not having a significant effect within the 150...