One of the big issues for the development of extra heavy crude oil,such as Canadian oil sand bitumen,is the difficulty in transportation from the wellhead to the refinery because of its high density and viscosity.Conventionally,a dilution method which dilutes extra heavy oil with a diluent or a full-upgrading method,typically a combination of thermal cracking and catalytic processing,is applied to improve the density and viscosity to a level that will permit transport through pipelines.However,these conventional approaches cannot be applied for all cases for reasons related to the availability of a diluent source or from the economic point of view.Partial upgrading is a new approach to produce pipeline transportable crude through the use of a simpler process configuration than the full-upgrading method.JGC’s Supercritical Water Cracking(SCWC)process is a partial upgrading process.A 5 bpd pilot facility has been successfully operated with Canadian oil sand bitumen.In this study,an outline of the SCWC process is introduced together with information regarding its performance and a description of the characteristics of the products.The results of an economic evaluation are also shown to compare the SCWC process with the conventional methods.
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