THE NEXT BIG CHALLENGE

摘要

Unconventional heavy resources such as tar sands, shale oil and heavy crude oil have yet to see extensive use in the marketplace because of the processing challenges that they introduce. Meanwhile, the reserves of conventional, easy-to-process crude oils continue to decline. One of the next big challenges for the catalyst industry is to enable these ultra-heavy oils to be processed with equivalent ease to conventional crudes. The issue with these unconventional resources is not only that they are heavy, viscous and often acidic,-but that they also contain elevated amounts of contaminants such as nickel, vanadium and nitrogen.