Making Something From Nothing....Kinda

Hi again,

In my last post I mentioned that I would dive into the different areas of optimization, and how they are achieved.  This week I will go into how lower end products are made into products of higher value.  To achieve this, there are a multitude of units that work towards this goal, so I will go over the general concept, and talk about one unit in particular.

The general concept of a refinery is to take crude oil and create valuable products, most notably gasoline.  To do this, the refinery takes the heavy crude, and breaks the long hydrocarbon chains into smaller ones.  However, during this process, a number of other products are created, some more valuable than others.  Generally, the lighter the product (smaller hydrocarbon chains creates a lighter product) the more valuable it is.  The least valuable product from refineries tends to be asphalt, which is a mixture of heavy byproducts.  

So now the quest is to make those heavy byproducts lighter and thus more valuable.  Enter the magical coker unit.  What does it do? Great question.  This unit will take those super heavy products, such as residual oils (heavy byproducts from units that create what eventually turns into gas), and makes them into a few different lighter products.  The main products are naphtha (mixed with other products to make gasoline), light and heavy gas oils (used as an energy source), and petroleum coke (also called pet. coke or simply coke).  As you may have guess, the last product is where the name of the unit comes from.  

The petroleum coke in many ways is why this unit is so useful.  Petroleum coke is very similar to coal in use and appearance.  This means that the coker takes what would eventually turn into asphalt, and creates a valuable energy source.  I also mentioned last week about the need to optimize energy, and some coker units do this by using some of the petroleum coke produced to provide the necessary energy to run the unit itself (I’ll continue into energy optimization next week).

Now why is the coker and units like it important to mention?  The reason is that these units are one of the main ways that refineries are currently implementing to find better economic optimization.  The reason for this is because cokers are more useful as the quality of crude oil declines (remember in the last post I mentioned that the quality is in constant decline currently), as poor quality crude creates heavier byproducts that need a unit like the coker to refine.  Thus, units that refine these heavy byproducts are becoming increasingly necessary in the world’s refineries.

Well, that’s a bit on economic optimization.  It is a pretty complicated topic and I may revist this again later, but next week will be on energy optimization.  See you then.

Stephen