Today's refiners are under increasing pressure to improve margins and profitability in the face of a dwindling supply of quality crudes and stringent environmental regulations.
KBR's alliance with ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company (EMRE) delivers a family of hydrotreater technologies for the production of low-sulfur, clean burning transportation fuels. Our technologies are designed to address a full range of feedstocks and processing objectives.
The GO-fining™ technology upgrades gas oils to cat cracking feed ready for processing. Feedstocks can include virgin, thermal, cat cycle and deasphalted gas oils for sulfur/nitrogen removal, and fluid catalytic cracking feed pretreatment. GO-fining units meet the refiner's process requirements through advanced modeling of the GO-fining/FCC interactions. Our design flexibility around feed fouling is made possible through ExxonMobil's proprietary internal by-pass design and by-passable guard reactor. An inter-bed quench box can be designed for either treat gas or liquid quenching.
As refiners adapt to heavier opportunity crudes and the increased demand for diesel, additional gas oil processing will push existing FCCs to their capacity limits. MPHC technology addresses both of these needs economically. What's more, hydrogen consumption and operating and investment costs are low when compared to higher pressure hydrocrackers.
The MPHC solution can handle straight run VGOs as well as DeAsphalted Oil (DAO) feeds. Unconverted feed makes excellent feed to the FCC. A two stage moderate pressure design pairing Isomerization DeWaxing (MIDW™) technology can offer very high conversions.
MPHC technology can be used to economically upgrade FCC Light Cycle Oil (LCO) to a N+A rich naphtha for aromatics production while upgrading the unconverted LCO to higher cetane diesel blendstock.
The unconverted material from an MPHC can be charged to an MIDW™ (Isomerization DeWaxer) stage which can also achieve an incremental 25 to 75% conversion. The MIDW process selectively converts the paraffinic MPHC bottoms to high quality middle distillate fuels. The MPHC and MIDW processes can be integrated in a cost effective process design to achieve up to 90% total conversion with high yields of quality middle distillates. Investment costs and operating costs (particularly hydrogen consumption) are reduced as compared to conventional high pressure hydrocracking.
As refiners reconfigure their refineries to produce ultra-low-sulfur diesel (ULSD) to comply with EPA regulations, KBR engineering and technology specialists are ready to assist our clients to achieve their operating and business objectives using proven approaches for meeting density and other critical specifications.
In addition to the technology for Ultra Low Sulfur diesel (ULSD) the Alliance offers premium distillate technologies based on unique MIDW™ catalysts for the production of winter/arctic grade diesel with extremely high diesel yields.
EMRE had the first commercial unit in the industry for selective FCC naphtha desulfurization (SCANfining™) to preserve octane. Many commercial units utilize SCANfining today.
OCTGAIN™ is another commercially proven technology for FCC naphtha desulfurization where the product octane can be higher than that of the feed. The technology is specially suitable when LPG yield is desirable.
