Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Canada has extensive reserves of heavy oils, including bitumen extracted from tar sands. In addition, heavy oils constitute a significant component of many conventional types of crude. Heavy oils must be upgraded to cleaner and more valuable products. One of the most advanced upgraders are Fluid Cokers, where 15 to 20% of Canada's crude oil is produced. Heavy oil is sprayed into a fluidized bed of hot coke particles where its long hydrocarbon chains are thermally cracked into more valuable fragments, which form a synthetic crude oil. About 20 wt% of the bitumen feed is converted to solid coke, which deposits on the bed particles. About 40% of the steam used in fluid cokers goes to the attrition nozzles, which grind the particles to maintain them at their optimum size. If attrition nozzles could be operated with a much lower steam flowrate, the fluid cokers could produce more synthetic crude with less carbon dioxide emissions and less wastewater. The vision which drives this proposal, which is sponsored by Syncrude Canada, is to develop attrition nozzles that will dramatically reduce the consumption of steam. The proposed program will run for 2 years. Its first deliverable will be the optimization of the geometry of the attrition nozzles. The impact of operating parameters such as nozzle size, particle size, bed temperature, attrition steam pressure and temperature on the attrition efficiency will then be quantified. NSERC funding will allow for longer-term deliverables such the development of completely new attrition nozzle designs, and a general, comprehensive model of attrition jets. The Canadian companies that use fluid cokers, Syncrude Canada and Imperial Oil, will greatly benefit from the proposed research, which will make them more competitive and reduce their environmental footprint. Other companies either upgrade bitumen with delayed cokers or dilute raw bitumen with solvent and pipe it to the USA. By making fluid cokers more attractive, the proposed research would help create new high value jobs in Canada, and encourage a switch from delayed coking to fluid coking, which would cut greenhouse emissions by about 50% for each barrel of synthetic crude. )