A rapidly expanding oil sands industry and a dwindlingsupply of feedstock for Alberta’s ethane-based petrochemicalindustry have stimulated interest in evaluating bitumen forproducing a broad slate of refined products, includingpetrochemicals. Two industry/government studies evaluateddifferent process schemes for integrating oilsands, refining andpetrochemical operations and convert heavy gas oils into bothrefined products and petrochemicals. Since market demand forfuels and refined products far exceeds that for petrochemicals,the performance characteristics of the heavy oil conversionprocesses are important to optimize the volume ratios of theproducts to meet market volume demands. The paper reviewsdifferent heavy oil processing technologies focusing on olefin tofuel product ratios and flexibility to change these ratios. Thereview includes conventional non-catalytic thermal (steam)cracking, as well as catalytic processes. These technologies areat different stages of commercial development for production offuels and olefins, and must be evaluated and adapted to meetAlberta’s aromatic bitumen-derived heavy gas oils. Work isunderway in an industry/government study towards developingan integrated process for the combined production of refinedfuels and petrochemical feedstocks. In addition, two workshopswill be held in February 2005 to address the business andregulatory gaps that must be addressed before such a processcan be commercialized; the results from the workshops will alsobe discussed in the paper.
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