Grant: Industrial Research Chairs

Canada has extensive reserves of heavy oils, including bitumen extracted from oil sands. Worldwide, technically recoverable heavy oil reserves are now larger than conventional oil reserves. 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 such as gasoline, kerosene, diesel fuel and petrochemical feedstocks.One of the most advanced upgrading processes is Fluid Coking. 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 that can then be processed in regular refineries. ExxonMobil uses Fluid Coking in many of its refineries. Fluid Cokers are used by Imperial Oil in its Sarnia refinery and by Syncrude Canada in its Fort McMurray upgrading plant. Between 15 and 20% of Canada's crude oil production is processed in Fluid Cokers. Using Fluid Cokers instead of the most common delayed cokers greatly reduces net greenhouse gas emissions.The vision which drives this proposal, and which is shared by Syncrude Canada, is to improve Fluid Cokers through a better understanding of the Fluid Coking process and the development of new technologies. The practical objectives are to increase the operability and liquid yields of Fluid Cokers and to reduce the environmental footprint of heavy oil upgrading.