A rapidly expanding oil sands industry and a dwindling supply of feedstock for Alberta's ethane-based petrochemical industry have stimulated interest in evaluating bitumen for producing a broad slate of refined products,including petrochemicals.Two industry/government studies evaluated different process schemes for integrating oilsands,refining and petrochemical operations and convert heavy gas oils into both refined products and petrochemicals.Since market demand for fuels and refined products far exceeds that for petrochemicals, the performance characteristics of the heavy oil conversion processes are important to optimize the volume ratios of the products to meet market volume demands.The paper reviews different heavy oil processing technologies focusing on olefin to fuel product ratios and flexibility to change these ratios.The review includes conventional non-catalytic thermal(steam) cracking,as well as catalytic processes.These technologies are at different stages of commercial development for production of fuels and olefins,and must be evaluated and adapted to meet Alberta's aromatic bitumen-derived heavy gas oils.Work is underway in an industry/government study towards developing an integrated process for the combined production of refined fuels and petrochemical feedstocks.In addition,two workshops will be held in February 2005 to address the business and regulatory gaps that must be addressed before such a process can be commercialized;the results from the workshops will also be discussed in the paper.
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