CRUDE OIL API 30, API 16

CRUDE OIL

Crude Oil API 30, API 16 (Crude Oil = Crude Oil)

API Gravity

API (American Petroleum Institute) gravity is a commonly used index of the density of a crude oil or refined product.

Crude Oil

Also known as: Crude Oil

Crude Oil is a natural mixture of Liquid Hydrocarbons.

In its natural state, Crude Oil has few direct uses.

However, when processed through an oil refinery, it can be transformed into a wide variety of high-value liquid petroleum products, such as gasoline and diesel.

The value of these products comes from their high energy density in their liquid state, making them ideal as transportation fuels.

Crude oil comes in hundreds of different varieties, called crude grades.

As a natural raw material, crude oil from different fields and deposits can have very different properties.

Raw grades from the same location with similar properties will typically be referred to as a single grade.

Examples of some well-known crude oil grades are: Brent, Tapis and WTI.

There are a wide variety of different properties used to distinguish between raw grades. These are detailed in a chemical analysis of the crude oil called a crude test.

Refined Products

Also known as: petroleum products, finished products

Petroleum products are the outputs of an oil refinery.

A typical refinery produces a wide variety of different products from each barrel of crude oil it processes.

In general, refineries operate to produce as many high-value light products as possible (gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel), with other products essentially acting as byproducts.

Some of the main products of a typical refinery are:

Propane: used as a raw material for cracking ethylene or mixed with LPG for fuel use.

The cracking process involves a highly endothermic reaction, which requires a large amount of energy for the dissociation of naphtha. A mixture of naphtha and gas is preheated to 750-850°C by adding steam and high temperature products in the reaction furnace.

Butane: used as raw material for cracking ethylene or mixed with LPG for fuel use.

LPG (Liquefied Petroleum Gas): a mixture of propane and butane used as fuel.

Light Naphtha: used as raw material in ethylene crackers.

Gasoline: Used as a transportation fuel for passenger cars and light trucks.

Aviation Gasoline: Used as motor fuel in light aircraft.

Jet Fuel: used as fuel for jet aircraft.

Kerosene Fuel: used as a residential fuel for cooking, heating and lighting.

Diesel: Used as fuel for heavy trucks, trains, and heavy equipment.

Industrial Diesel: used as fuel for furnaces in industrial plants and commercial/residential heating (heating fuel)

Residual Fuel: used as fuel in power generation and for large oceangoing ships (bunker fuel)

Many refineries also produce specialty or non-fuel products, such as:

Asphalt: used to pave roads and in the manufacture of building materials (e.g., roofing shingles)

Base Oils: used to manufacture lubricating oils for use in industrial machinery and vehicle engines.

Propylene - Can be separated for sale to the petrochemical industry

Aromatics: they can be separated from the reformed for sale to the petrochemical industry.

Wax: extracted from lubricating oil and sold as raw material for the production of special wax (as soft wax) or treated in the refinery to a finished wax product.

Grease: used as a solid lubricating oil, mainly in industrial uses.

White Oil: A colorless, odorless, and tasteless oil used by the food, cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries.

Turpentine: material from the naphtha range used as an industrial or domestic solvent

Sulfur: A contaminant when present in other products, but once separated, it can be sold as a raw material for the petrochemical industry.

Petroleum Coke: A byproduct of the cooking process that can be sold as fuel for power plants and cement plants or to make electrodes and anodes.

The most common characteristics used to identify the quality of a crude oil are its API (American Petroleum Institute) gravity and its sulfur content.

The highest value crude oil grades are typically those with high API gravity and low sulfur content. These are known as "Light and Sweet Raw".

At the opposite end of the spectrum are grades with low API gravity and high sulfur content, which are known as "Heavy Sour Crudes."

API stands for American Petroleum Institute, which is the industry organization that created this measure.

The API is an organization for the US oil industry. It lobbies for the industry on policy issues and also sets some industry standards.

API Gravity Calculation

API Gravity is a commonly used index of the density of a crude oil or refined product.

Density

Also known as: Gravity

Density is the weight of a product per unit of volume.

Generally, lighter (lower density) crude oils are more valuable.

API Gravity Calculation

The API is calculated from the specific gravity of a hydrocarbon using this formula:

API = (141.5/specific gravity) - 131.5

Specific Gravity

Also known as: SPG

Specific Gravity is an index used to measure the Density of a Liquid.

Specific gravity is calculated as the ratio between the density of a liquid and the density of water. So any liquid with a density greater than water has a specific gravity greater than 1.

Liquids with a density less than water, which includes most grades of crude oil and petroleum products, will have a specific gravity between 0.0 and 1.0.

In the petroleum industry, specific gravity is a common quality specification for finished products. However, for crude oil grades, the API gravity index is more commonly used.

Calculation of specific gravity from API gravity:

Specific Gravity = 141.5/(API Gravity + 131.5)

API Gravity of Crude Oil Grades

A Crude Oil will normally have an API between 15 and 45 degrees.

A higher API indicates a lighter (lower density) crude oil.

A lower API indicates heavier (denser) crude oil.

Generally, lighter crude oils (high API) are more valuable because they produce more high-value light products when they pass through a refinery.

Refinery

An oil refinery is a processing plant that contains crude oil and a mixture of different petroleum products.

There are currently more than 600 refineries in operation in the world, operated by more than 200 refining companies.

Light crude oil typically falls in the 35-45 API range, which includes most higher-value crude oils such as Brent and WTI.

Brent

Brent is a light sweet grade of crude oil produced in the North Sea.

The North Sea lies between Great Britain, Denmark, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and France. An epicer sea on the European continental shelf, it connects to the Atlantic Ocean via the English Channel in the south and the Norwegian Sea in the north.

Brent plays a uniquely important role in the global oil industry by acting as a benchmark crude oil against which most other grades of crude oil are priced.

Brent is important as a regional benchmark for a large amount of light sweet crudes produced in the North Sea.

It is also used as a global benchmark for global crude oil prices.

Brent's role as a benchmark is reinforced by its active forward and derivatives markets.

Brent quality:

API: 37.5

Sulfur: 0.40%

(Sulphurous content)

Also known as: sulfur content

Sulfur is an element commonly found in crude oil and petroleum products.

Sulfur is considered an undesirable pollutant because, when burned, it generates sulfur oxides.

Consequently, most petroleum products have a limit on how much sulfur they can contain, making sulfur removal an important part of the overall refinery process.

Sulfur can also damage some of the catalysts used in refining process units, so it must be removed from some intermediate streams before they can be fed to a conversion unit.

Catalyst

A catalyst is a substance that enhances a chemical reaction without being one of the reactants.

Process Units

A refinery is a plant that includes several different processing units. Each of these plays a role in the overall process of converting Crude Oil into Petroleum Products.

A typical refinery will have a dozen or more of these processing units. These fall into four broad categories:

• Separation units: Some process units separate a mixture of hydrocarbons into its components by distillation or extraction. The most common separation units are atmospheric distillation and vacuum distillation. Hydrocarbons are any substance made up of carbon and hydrogen. This includes crude oil and all petroleum products, as well as natural gas and coal, crude atmospheric distillation, CDU, fractional distillation.

Vacuum distillation.

Vacuum distillation: Also known as: vacuum tower, vacuum unit, vacuum intermittent, VDU

The vacuum tower separates the atmospheric residue. The atmospheric bottoms are the heaviest distillation cuts of the atmospheric distillation tower. Also known as: distillation fractions, direct flows. Also known as: atmospheric tower, tubular still, crude oil unit, primary distillation, crude oil distillation unit, CDU,

Fractional Distillation

Atmospheric distillation is the first and most fundamental step in the refining process. The main purpose of the atmospheric distillation tower is to separate crude oil into its components (or distillation cuts, distillation fractions) for further processing by other processing units.

Distillation cuts are the output streams of a distillation tower also known as: atmospheric tower, tubular still, crude unit, primary distillation, crude distillation unit, CDU, fractional distillation.

They are called "cuts" because they are the result of separating crude oil into its constituent parts based on the different temperatures at which they evaporate and condense (e.g. cut points). In fractional distillation, a cut point is the temperature which defines the boundary between two crude oil fractions that are being separated.

Typical distillation cuts from atmospheric distillation and vacuum distillation Vacuum distillation

Also known as: vacuum tower, vacuum unit, vacuum intermittent, VDU

The vacuum tower separates the atmospheric residue generated by the atmospheric distillation tower into its components by distilling the residue under vacuum.

Vacuum is critical to separate the VGO from the vacuum residue to provide separate feed for the cracking units (FCC and hydrocracking) and deep conversion units (coker, visbreaker, asphalt). The heavier the crude oil processed, the larger the vacuum unit that will be required to separate the bottom of the barrel.

How does it work

Atmospheric tower bottoms are injected into the vacuum tower under a pressure of approximately 1/20 of atmospheric pressure (typically 25 to 40 mmHg or less). Under these low pressures, the atmospheric residue will vaporize at temperatures lower than those at which it begins to crack. This allows the separation of very heavy components without cracking.

Are:

• Refinery Gas - Composed of Methane (1 carbon atom and 4 hydrogen atoms) and Ethane (2 carbon atoms and 6 hydrogen atoms). This stream remains a gas and is sent to the fuel system.

• Propane: mixed with LPG or used as refinery fuel

• Butane: mixed with LPG or used as refinery fuel

• Light straight-distilled naphtha: sold as petrochemical feedstock, blended with gasoline or improved through isomerization.

Direct distillation light naphtha

Also known as: pentanes plus, light paraffinic naphtha, natural gasoline

Light straight-run naphtha is a distillation cut consisting of pentane and slightly heavier naphtha range material.

Light naphtha can come from the distillation of crude oil or the fractionation of NGL (natural gasoline).

The light naphtha distillation cut has three typical uses:

• Blend directly into a finished light naphtha product

• Feeding to the isomerization unit to make isomerized to mix with gasoline

• Direct mixture in gasoline

As a blending material for making gasoline, light naphtha is of fairly low quality. It tends to have low octane and high vapor pressure. Therefore, it usually only makes up a very small portion of the gasoline reserve.

Raw material

Feedstock is any hydrocarbon input to a process unit. This could be crude oil or any intermediate refining stream or petroleum products, as well as natural gas and coal.

When the term feedstock is used for entire refinery feed, it generally refers to non-crude feedstocks such as VGO (Vacuum Gas Oil) and blends. VGO is one of the two outlets of the vacuum distillation tower (along with the vacuum residue). VGO is the lighter of the two materials.

The main use of VGO is as feed to cracking units such as the FCC or hydrocracker. The FCC is particularly valuable in a refinery that is trying to maximize gasoline production on residual fuel oil. The FCC produces a high volume of fairly good quality gasoline (high octane, also known as RON, DON, and low vapor pressure. Vapor pressure is an important quality specification for gasoline. Specifically, vapor pressure is a measure of a fuel's volatility, or the degree to which it vaporizes at a given temperature. ). However, its diesel volumetric efficiency is low and of low quality (low cetane), since it is composed of cracked material that tends to have low cetane. Cetane is one of the most important qualities of the diesel product. Specifically, cetane is a measure of the tendency of diesel fuel to self-ignite when injected into the combustion chamber of a diesel engine that has been heated by compression of the air in the chamber.

In a market where diesel is preferred over gasoline, an FCC is generally less valuable than a hydrocracker. Also known as: HCK, HCU, unicracker, VGO hydrocracker

In a refinery, the hydrocracker improves VGO through cracking while injecting hydrogen. This produces a high volume of high quality diesel and kerosene product. This contrasts with the FCC, which uses the same feed (VGO) but produces more and better quality gasoline.

The hydrocracker is particularly valuable in a refinery trying to maximize diesel production and reduce residual fuel oil.

These units upgrade VGO into more valuable products, namely gasoline and diesel.

If not updated, VGO is mixed with residual fuel oil. Also known as: residue, fuel oil #6, heavy fuel oil, oil 6

Residual fuel oil is one of the lowest-value petroleum products from a refinery. It is essentially a byproduct of the production of light products that are the primary focus of a refinery.

However, this is quite rare since the value of VGO is much higher as an upgrade source. Often, if a refinery lacks enough cracking to improve the VGO it generates, it will sell it as intermediate to another refinery, also known as intermediate streams, blends, unfinished oils, rather than downgrading it by blending it with residual fuel oil.

VGO is often subdivided into a lighter and heavier fraction called LVGO and HVGO, respectively.

Petrochemistry

Petrochemicals generally refer to basic petroleum-derived chemicals that are primarily used in the production of plastics and fibers. Most feedstocks for petrochemicals come from the refining and processing of NGL, also known as Natural Gas Liquids, including ethane, propane, butane, naphtha, and aromatics.

Gasoline

Also known as: gasoline, motor gasoline, mogas, benzine

Gasoline is one of the main petroleum products produced from the processing of crude oil in an oil refinery.

Gasoline is one of the highest-value light products (along with jet fuel and diesel). It is used almost exclusively in the transportation sector, mainly as fuel in cars and other light vehicles. Gasoline demand varies seasonally with the highest demand during the northern hemisphere summer. Summer is also when gasoline quality specifications (especially vapor pressure) tend to be stricter, resulting in generally higher prices in these months.

In general, refiners will try to maximize their gasoline production, along with diesel, to maximize profits. Since the two products are extracted from different boiling range materials, they are largely complementary. However, there are some conversion units that favor one over the other, forcing refiners to decide which will create more value. In particular, FCCs will tend to upgrade the VGO more toward gasoline, and hydrocrackers will upgrade the VGO more toward diesel.

Qualities of gasoline products

Gasoline-powered vehicles use Otto cycle (spark ignition) engines. To work well and minimize environmental impact, this requires gasoline to have specific product qualities.

Some of the most important are:

• Octane – A measure of a fuel's resistance to self-ignition (detonation) when compressed with air in a spark-ignition engine.

• Vapor pressure: the volatility or tendency of a fuel to vaporize.

• Distillation profile: how much gasoline (% by volume) evaporates at different temperatures

• Vapor lock index – The tendency of gasoline to vaporize in the fuel system, causing vapor lock.

• Driveability index – A measure of a fuel's performance under both cold starting and warm-up conditions.

• Sulfur content – a measure of the sulfur remaining in the fuel.

• Aromatic content: Aromatic compounds include high-octane materials such as benzene, toluene (7 carbon atoms), and xylene (8 carbon atoms).

• Benzene content: a known carcinogen to humans, so it is limited to very small amounts in many grades of gasoline.

• Olefin content: They tend to form coatings on engine walls, reducing performance over time. Olefins are unsaturated hydrocarbons that contain a double bond between two carbon atoms. Examples are butylene and propylene.

Gasoline Mixture

Gasoline is usually a complex mixture of many different refinery intermediate streams.

The most common components produced in refineries in the gasoline group are:

• FCC gasoline from FCC unit: good octane and vapor pressure, but often high in sulfur and olefins

• Reform from the reformer - High octane and low vapor pressure, but high aromatic compound content

• Alkylate Alkylation Unit - Good octane and vapor pressure without aromatics, olefins or sulfur

• Isomerization unit isomerization: moderately good octane, low aromatics and low sulfur, but high vapor pressure

• Direct distillation light naphtha directly from the distillation tower - Low octane and high vapor pressure

Gasoline also often contains non-refinery blending components, either as octane boosters or to satisfy a renewable fuel mandate. Typical non-refinery blends include:

• Ethanol - High octane without aromatic compounds or sulfur, but with high vapor pressure

• MTBE – High octane, no aromatics or sulfur, and low vapor pressure, but limited by environmental concerns related to storage and leaks into water reservoirs in some areas. It is banned in the US.

• ETBE - High octane without aromatics or sulfur, but with high vapor pressure

Gasoline is also mixed with various additives to improve engine performance, such as detergents. In the past, the additive TEL (a compound that includes lead) was

• Heavy naphtha - Mostly improved through the reformer (usually has between 7 and 9 atoms)

• Kerosene – Used to make jet fuel or mixed with diesel.

• Atmospheric diesel oil: used to make diesel or converted to gasoline through the FCC

• Atmospheric bottoms - Contains all hydrocarbons that do not vaporize. It is usually fed to vacuum distillation unit for further separation.

• VGO or vacuum gas oil – usually sent to FCC or hydrocracker for conversion into light products

• Vacuum Residue – Literally, the bottom of the barrel. Typically blended with residual fuel oil or upgraded through a coker or visbreaker

It consists of all components of crude oil that have boiling points above approximately 650F (343C). These cuttings cannot be vaporized in the atmospheric distillation tower because they begin to crack or decompose at the temperatures required to achieve vaporization. Consequently, they remain in liquid form during the atmospheric distillation process and literally come out of the "bottom" of the tower. generated by the atmospheric distillation tower into its components by distilling the residue under vacuum.

Vacuum is critical to separate the VGO from the vacuum residue to provide separate feed for the cracking units (FCC and hydrocracking) and deep conversion units (coker, visbreaker, asphalt). The heavier the crude oil processed, the larger the vacuum unit that will be required to separate the bottom of the barrel.

How does it work

Atmospheric tower bottoms are injected into the vacuum tower under a pressure of approximately 1/20 of atmospheric pressure (typically 25 to 40 mmHg or less). Under these low pressures, the atmospheric residue will vaporize at temperatures lower than those at which it begins to crack. This allows the separation of very heavy components without cracking. refined products

Also known as: petroleum products, petroleum products, finished products

Petroleum products are the outputs of an oil refinery. A typical refinery produces a wide variety of different products from each barrel of crude oil it processes. Typically, refineries operate to produce as many high-value light products (gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel) as possible, with the other products essentially acting as byproducts.

Some of the main products of a typical refinery are:

• Propane: used as raw material for cracking ethylene or mixed with LPG for fuel use.

• Butane: used as raw material for cracking ethylene or mixed with LPG for fuel use.

• LPG (liquefied petroleum gas): a mixture of propane and butane used as fuel

• Light naphtha: used as raw material in ethylene crackers.

• Gasoline: used as a transportation fuel for passenger cars and light trucks.

• Aviation gasoline: Also known as Avgas, it is used as motor fuel in light aircraft.

• Jet fuel: used as fuel for jet aircraft.

• Kerosene fuel: used as a residential fuel for cooking, heating and lighting

• Diesel: used as fuel for heavy trucks, trains and heavy equipment.

• Industrial diesel oil: used as fuel for furnaces in industrial plants and commercial/residential heating (heating fuel)

• Residual fuel: used as fuel in power generation and for large oceangoing ships (bunker fuel)

Many refineries also produce specialty or non-fuel products, such as:

• Asphalt – used for paving roads and in the manufacture of building materials (e.g., roofing shingles)

• Base oils: used to make lubricating oils for use in industrial machinery and vehicle engines.

• Propylene - Can be separated for sale to the petrochemical industry

• Aromatics: they can be separated from the reformed for sale to the petrochemical industry.

• Wax: extracted from lubricating oil and sold as raw material for the production of special wax (as soft wax) or treated in the refinery to a finished wax product.

• Grease: used as solid lubricating oil, mainly in industrial uses.

• White oil – A colorless, odorless and tasteless oil used by the food, cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries.

• Turpentine: material from the naphtha range used as an industrial or domestic solvent.

• Sulfur – A contaminant when present in other products, but once separated, it can be sold as a raw material for the petrochemical industry.

• Petroleum coke: a byproduct of the coking process that can be sold as fuel for power plants and cement plants or to make electrodes and anodes. Natural gas

• Natural Gas is a gas composed primarily of methane, but typically also with some ethane. Most natural gas comes directly from upstream oil and gas wells, not from refining.

• In Refining, natural gas is often purchased and used as a refinery fuel and as a feedstock to produce hydrogen in the hydrogen plant.

• Atmospheric Distillation is the first and most fundamental step in the refining process. The main purpose of the atmospheric distillation tower is to separate crude oil into its components (or distillation cuts, distillation fractions) for further processing by other processing units.

Atmospheric distillation typically sets the capacity limit for the entire refinery. All processed crude oil must first go through atmospheric distillation. Additionally, atmospheric distillation typically provides the majority of the feed for the refinery's other process units.

In most refineries, bottoms from the atmospheric distillation tower will be sent to the vacuum tower for further separation.

The design and operation of the atmospheric distillation tower will limit the type of crude oil the refinery can process, further limiting the volume and quality of feed to other process units.

• Conversion Units : Conversion units take individual hydrocarbon streams and convert them into other hydrocarbons by changing their size and chemical structure. Some examples are the coker, FCC and alkylation unit.

In refining, the alkylation unit produces a high-quality gasoline blend by combining two LPG range molecules to form one gasoline range molecule. This involves reacting isobutane with some type of light olefin, usually propylene or butylene from the FCC.

• Treatment Units: Various process units improve a hydrocarbon stream by removing impurities and changing some chemical properties, but without changing the performance of the refinery product. Good examples of this are hydrotreaters.

• Support Process Units: This includes utilities and other non-hydrocarbon processing units.

WTI

Abbreviation for: West Texas Intermediate, TI, DSW, MEH

WTI is a light sweet crude oil produced in the interior of the US.

For many years, WTI was considered a global benchmark crude oil. This role has largely been displaced by Brent, but WTI remains an important regional benchmark for North America.

There are three main locations where WTI prices are quoted:

• Midland: This is the price point closest to actual WTI production. It is one of the main gathering points for WTI in West Texas before it is shipped via pipeline. Pipelines are used to transport crude oil, refined products, and some streams, from the Gulf Coast, Cushing, or nearby refineries. The US Gulf Coast is a major refining supply center and spot market trading hub. The Gulf Coast is generally defined to include refineries located along the U.S. coast of the Gulf of Mexico extending from southern Texas to southern Alabama. This includes refining clusters in Corpus Christi (TX), Houston (TX), Beaumont/Port Arthur (TX), Lake Charles (LA), along Louisiana's Mississippi River, and on the coast of Mississippi and Alabama. The spot market for crude oil and refined products refers to the trading of large physical cargoes or packages in single transactions for short-term delivery. While this market represents a small portion of overall crude oil and product transactions, it plays a critical role in setting prices for most other transactions.

Most purchases and sales of crude oil and products are made under forward contracts. However, most of these contracts rely on prices reported in the spot market as the basis for their pricing.

Buyers and sellers in the spot market are primarily crude oil producers, refiners, professional trading companies, and large distributors or consumers of petroleum products (e.g., large fuel retailers, airlines, fuel wholesalers).

Trades are usually made through direct one-on-one interaction of traders via phone, text message, or online exchanges.

While transactions are unique offerings, they tend to be highly standardized in terms of:

• Location: the place where the cargo or shipment will physically change hands

• Freight shipping basis: FOB, CIF.

• Mode of transportation of oil: a tanker load, a barge load, or a pipeline shipment.

• Transaction time window: period in which the transaction must be completed. Product transactions typically take place at a major refining or transportation center.

Examples include:

US Gulf Coast – centered around the Houston refining hub and sometimes includes New Orleans, Corpus Christi, Lake Charles, and Beaumont/Port Arthur

• NWE (Northwest Europe): centered around the port of Rotterdam and sometimes including Amsterdam and Antwerp (called ARA)

• Singapore. Singapore is a major refining center in Asia and the region's leading spot market trading centre.

Singapore has several large and complex refineries. A complex refinery is one that has a large number of high-value conversion units. A low complexity refinery has fewer and fewer value-added units that give it a capacity that goes far beyond the needs of the small local market. This capacity acts as a transitional capacity for the rest of Asia.

The spot market in Singapore is deep and active due to the high volume of refined products exported and the number of players producing and purchasing cargoes of refined products.

• New York Harbor – in or near the harbor of New York and New Jersey. New York Harbor is a major spot market trading center for refined products.

The product refined in New York Harbor comes from imports (particularly from Europe), production from nearby refineries around Philadelphia, and the colonial pipeline from the Gulf Coast.

Most major refined products have spot price assessments in the New York Harbor market.

• Mediterranean – Including the ports of Genoa (Italy) or Lavera (France)

• Cushing: Cushing is an intermediate transportation point where pipelines from producing regions (West Texas, Canada, Oklahoma) and refining regions (Gulf Coast and Midwest) meet. WTI Cushing Blend is also called Domestic Sweet Blend (DSW)

• Houston (East Magellan): At this location on the Gulf Coast, crude oil arrives by pipeline from Cushing and Midland, and is shipped by pipeline to Gulf Coast refineries or exported by tanker to the international market. WTI blends in Houston are also called MEH. Magellan East Houston is a crude oil terminal in Houston, Texas, that is an aggregation point for crude oil brought to the Gulf Coast from inland producing regions.

• MEH serves as a trading point for WTI on the Gulf Coast.

WTI (and similar US domestic crudes) are consumed primarily by US refineries, in the Gulf Coast and Midwest regions. WTI is also exported to the international market, mainly through the ports of Corpus Christi and Houston.

Quality:

API: 40.8

Sulfur: 0.34%

INTERMEDIATE

ALSO KNOWN AS: INTERMEDIATE CURRENTS, MIXTURES, UNFINISHED OILS

An intermediate refers to any refinery hydrocarbon stream other than crude oil or one of the petroleum products (such as gasoline). This includes all distillation outputs (distillation fractions) and conversion units.

Typically, intermediate products are produced and consumed within the same refinery. Most are used as feed for conversion units or as blends to manufacture finished products. However, it is not uncommon for refineries to exchange small volumes of intermediate products between themselves from time to time.

Most refining conversion units employ some type of catalyst to speed up the chemical reactions that take place.

Conversion processes

Conversion process units are used to convert one hydrocarbon stream into another by changing the size and structure of the molecule. The goal is to shift refinery performance from less valuable products (e.g., residual fuel oil, LPG) to more valuable ones (e.g., gasoline, diesel).

They do this by breaking large molecules into smaller ones (cracking), joining small molecules into larger ones, or changing the shape of the molecules without changing the overall size.

Several different types of conversion units can be found in refineries. The refiner's choice of which ones to stock in his refinery generally depends on the nature of the raw feedstock available and the products most in demand (and value) in his local market:

FCC - Cracks VGO to form a blend of lighter products, especially gasoline

RCC: breaks down atmospheric waste to form a mixture of lighter products, especially gasoline

Coker: Breaks down vacuum residue to form a mixture of lighter products, VGO and petroleum coke.

Hydrocracker: Breaks down VGO while injecting hydrogen to form a mixture of lighter products, favoring saturated hydrocarbon products, such as diesel.

Residue Hydrocracker – Breaks up vacuum residue while injecting hydrogen to form a lighter product mix, also favoring diesel

Reformer: Changes the molecular structure of heavy gasoline by creating more aromatics, naphthenic rings and isomers to increase the octane rating for blending with gasoline.

Alkylation: Combines a light olefin (butylene, propylene) with isobutane to form a high-quality gasoline blend.

Dimer or poly: combines two light olefins to form a high-quality gasoline blend

C4 isomerization: changes the molecular structure of butane to produce isobutane

C5/C6 isomerization: changes the molecular structure of light gasoline to increase the isomers and increase its octane rating for the gasoline blend

Visbreaker: Breaks up vacuum residue to reduce its viscosity for fuel oil blending

Thermal Cracker: Cracks the VGO to form a lighter product mixture and reduce the viscosity of the VGO

Common catalysts used in refining include:

• Hydrofluoric acid - Alkylation

• Platinum - C4 isomerization

• Sulfuric acid - Alkylation

As a general rule, a crude grade with high sulfur content will have a lower value. This type of crude oil is often called sour crude oil.

SOx

Also known as: sulfur oxides

Sulfur oxides or SOx are compounds formed by the reaction of sulfur with oxygen when a sulfur-containing hydrocarbon is burned.

SOx emissions are a source of air pollution and are regulated in most markets.

SOx emissions from most refined products are controlled by the maximum sulfur limit established in the fuel.

In locations where large volumes of fuel are burned (e.g. power plants), scrubbers can be used to remove SOx from flue gases after combustion, allowing the use of higher sulfur fuel.

Benchmark (Price)

Reference point (price)

Also known as: Bookmark

A benchmark is a price quote for a grade or product of crude oil that is used as a reference to set the price of other crude oils or products. Typically, benchmarks are for a highly traded commodity, with similar quality and location to other commodities.

Some examples are:

• Brent crude oil, FOB North Sea

• WTI crude oil, in Cushing

• Petrol, Platts Singapore Medium

Crude oils lighter than 45 are generally considered extra-light crude oil or condensates and have a lower value than light crude oil because they contain many light end products, such as propane and butane. A medium crude oil is in the range of 25-35 API and a heavy crude oil is in the range of 15-25 API. Anything below 15 API would be considered extra heavy crude.

Vacuum distillation

Also known as: vacuum tower, vacuum unit, vacuum intermittent, VDU

The vacuum tower separates the atmospheric residue generated by the atmospheric distillation tower into its components by distilling the residue under vacuum.

Vacuum is critical to separate the VGO from the vacuum residue to provide separate feed for the cracking units (FCC and hydrocracking) and deep conversion units (coker, visbreaker, asphalt). The heavier the crude oil processed, the larger the vacuum unit that will be required to separate the bottom of the barrel.

How does it work

Atmospheric tower bottoms are injected into the vacuum tower under a pressure of approximately 1/20 of atmospheric pressure (typically 25 to 40 mmHg or less). Under these low pressures, the atmospheric residue will vaporize at temperatures lower than those at which it begins to crack. This allows the separation of very heavy components without cracking.

GBS-NET, LLC.

Broker IMPEX

gbs@us-burgoa.com