Leveraging Hydrocracking Flexibility to Improve Refinery Margins

The global refining market continues to be very challenging, as oil prices remain low and economic drivers push refiners to process heavier, more sour, and more difficult crudes. These opportunity crudes generate a higher percentage of the distressed streams which are either blended into lower value dispositions or are fed to different conversion units in the refinery. Upgrading these difficult streams to more valuable liquid products becomes paramount under the current environment as the low-value dispositions continue to become unavailable in the future – especially considering the recent International Maritime Organization (IMO) decision on bunker fuel quality requirements.

Leveraging the flexibility of hydrocracker pretreat catalyst systems to upgrade low value, highly processed streams via hydrocracking without sacrificing run-length, product quality, or margin by disposition as low-valued exports can improve refinery margins. The following case studies offer an exploration that showcases ways to leverage the flexibility of the hydrocracker to process various difficult streams. These streams include, but are not limited to, products from thermal cracking, de-asphalting units, catalytic cracking, coking, lube extraction, or ebullated bed residue upgraders. The three case studies described here demonstrate the different operating challenges and catalyst strategies employed to upgrade a broad range of very difficult feedstocks into premium quality clean fuel products.

The 3^rd case study focuses on Shell’s Scotford refinery and illustrates the evolution of pretreat design and operating strategies that address the increasingly demanding cycle objectives for converting synthetic feeds derived from tar sand bitumen via hydrocracking. It also emphasizes the value that close working of both refiner and catalyst supplier can bring by identifying opportunities to improve unit performance over multiple cycles and creating solutions to improve refinery margins.