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Small and Medium-Scale Refineries in Russia: Effective Processing & Oil Products Sales - III Annual International Forum 04 - 05 June 2009, Moscow, Russia

Small and Medium-Scale Refineries in Russia: Effective Processing & Oil Products Sales
4-5 June, 2009
Moscow, Russia, Renaissance Moscow Hotel

Forum background:

The issue of development and modernisation of the Russian oil refining have been actively discussed for several years at all levels of public and private sectors. In this context small refining does not receive enough attention though this is exactly the segment, which could play a decisive role in the industry, provided it finds support from the state.

New cutting-edge process technology, which has emerged in recent years, are capable of making a small-scale refining project economically viable and feasible. Building small refineries in pockets of products demand could overcome the problem associated with carrying fuel from large refineries located primarily in the European part of Russia. As a result of the uninhibited rise of freight rates, pipeline and rail tariffs, the cost of bringing products to remote regions often exceeds the refinery-gate price of the fuel.

Another advantage of small refineries is a much lower environmental impact in comparison to that of large-scale refining facilities. It is also much easier to operate small and medium-scale refineries at full capacity. Average annual capacity use rate at large refineries is around 65%, thus significantly higher production costs per tonne of output.

Yet another important factor in favour of developing small-tonnage facilities is the economic feasibility of operating a great many marginal oil and gas fields, which are currently mothballed due to tremendous capital expenses required to build pipelines to carry production from such wells to trunk oil and gas lines. On the other hand, a small refinery with conversion processes in the vicinity of those marginal fields could cover local motor fuels requirements almost a hundred percent.

The forum is a two-day set of events including:

over 12 sessions focusing on important issues for the Russian independent refiners sector with special emphasis on small and medium-scale refineries;

panels and open discussions bringing together independent producers with prospective consumers of feedstocks, refiners with traders and sales and marketing companies, transportation companies, design and process engineers, state authorities;

specialised exhibition of technology and process equipment used in construction and modernisation of refineries, as well as for metering, loading, transportation, and storage of refined products;

Who should attend the 2009 Forum:

Owners and top management of operating refineries and those under construction

Chief Technical Officers and engineers of refineries

Representatives of oil producing companies

Heads of fuel marketing and sales companies, tank farms and petrol stations

Representatives of transportation companies

Crude oil and products traders

We have also extended our invitations to members of Staff of the President and Government of the RF, RF Ministry of Natural Resources, RF Ministry of Energy, RF Ministry of Finance, RF Ministry of Regional Development, RF Ministry of Economic Development, Rostekhnadzor, Rosprirodnadzor, Rosnedra, SC Transneft JSC, RZhD, deputies of the Russian State Duma, members of the Federation Council, representative of authorities in Russian Federation Entities. The key prominent feature of this year’s event is the presentation of best practice by and available from small and medium-scale refineries as such operating in the independent refining sector. More than 25 refineries from over 15 Russian regions and the CIS will share their experience looking at specific cases and covering such issues as:

Finding an investor and securing loans for refinery construction;

Overcoming the problem of access to feedstocks and making feedstock delivery and refined products off-take logistics work;

Implementing efficient production arrangements to enhance the economic return of a refinery while maximising refined products output;

Making the right choice of location and site for a new small or medium-scale refinery;

Running a modernisation on an operating refinery and reasons why;

Overcoming refined products export transportation problem;

Products to make and target quality and specs;

Obtaining a license and an industrial safety expert evaluation report;

Process technology and equipment to be used to ensure quality and efficiency of operation; and many other.

Glossary

Oil products or petroleum products are useful materials derived from crude oil (petroleum) as it is processed in oil refineries.

Specialty end products:

• Gaseous fuels such as propane, stored and shipped in liquid form under pressure in specialized railcars to distributors.

• Liquid fuels blending (producing automotive and aviation grades of gasoline, kerosene, various aviation turbine fuels, and diesel fuels, adding dyes, detergents, antiknock additives, oxygenates, and anti-fungal compounds as required). Shipped by barge, rail, and tanker ship. May be shipped regionally in dedicated pipelines to point consumers, particularly aviation jet fuel to major airports, or piped to distributors in multi-product pipelines using product separators called pipeline inspection gauges ("pigs").

• Lubricants (produces light machine oils, motor oils, and greases, adding viscosity stabilizers as required), usually shipped in bulk to an offsite packaging plant.

• Wax (paraffin), used in the packaging of frozen foods, among others. May be shipped in bulk to a site to prepare as packaged blocks.

• Sulfur (or sulfuric acid), byproducts of sulfur removal from petroleum which may have up to a couple percent sulfur as organic sulfur-containing compounds. Sulfur and sulfuric acid are useful industrial materials. Sulfuric acid is usually prepared and shipped as the acid precursor oleum.

• Bulk tar shipping for offsite unit packaging for use in tar-and-gravel roofing or similar uses.

• Asphalt - used as a binder for gravel to form asphalt concrete, which is used for paving roads, lots, etc. An asphalt unit prepares bulk asphalt for shipment.

• Petroleum coke, used in specialty carbon products such as certain types of electrodes, or as solid fuel.

• Petrochemicals or petrochemical feedstocks, which are often sent to petrochemical plants for further processing in a variety of ways. The petrochemicals may be olefins or their precursors, or various types of aromatic petrochemicals.

Petrol is a petroleum-derived liquid mixture consisting mostly of aliphatic hydrocarbons and enhanced with aromatic hydrocarbons toluene, benzene or iso-octane to increase octane ratings, primarily used as fuel in internal combustion engines. It is colourless and highly volatile.

Diesel or diesel fuel is a specific fractional distillate of petroleum fuel oil that is used as fuel in a diesel engine.The term typically refers to fuel that has been processed from petroleum, but increasingly, alternatives such as biodiesel or biomass to liquid (BTL) or gas to liquid (GTL) diesel that are not derived from petroleum are being developed and adopted. For clarity, petroleum-derived diesel is increasingly called petrodiesel. Petroleum diesel, or petrodiesel is produced from petroleum and is a hydrocarbon mixture, obtained in the fractional distillation of crude oil between 200 °C and 350 °C at atmospheric pressure.

An oil refinery is an industrial process plant where crude oil is processed and refined into more useful petroleum products, such as gasoline, diesel fuel, asphalt base, heating oil, kerosine, and liquefied petroleum gas.[1][2] Oil refineries are typically large sprawling industrial complexes with extensive piping running throughout, carrying streams of fluids between large chemical processing units.

Major products of oil refineries Most products of oil processing are usually grouped into three categories: light distillates (LPG, gasoline, naphtha), middle distillates (kerosene, diesel), heavy distillates and residuum (fuel oil, lubricating oils, wax, tar). This classification is based on the way crude oil is distilled and separated into fractions (called distillates and residuum)• Liquid petroleum gas (LPG)

Common process units found in a refinery

• Desalter unit washes out salt from the crude oil before it enters the atmospheric distillation unit.

• Atmospheric Distillation unit distills crude oil into fractions.

•Vacuum Distillation unit further distills residual bottoms after atmospheric distillation.

• Naphtha Hydrotreater unit uses hydrogen to desulfurize naphtha from atmospheric distillation. Must hydrotreat the naphtha before sending to a Catalytic Reformer unit.

• Catalytic Reformer unit is used to convert the naphtha-boiling range molecules into higher octane reformate (reformer product). The reformate has higher content of aromatics, olefins, and cyclic hydrocarbons). An important byproduct of a reformer is hydrogen released during the catalyst reaction. The hydrogen is used either in the hydrotreaters or the hydrocracker.

• Distillate Hydrotreater unit desulfurizes distillates (such as diesel) after atmospheric distillation.

• Fluid Catalytic Cracking (FCC) unit upgrades heavier fractions into lighter, more valuable products.

• Hydrocracker unit uses hydrogen to upgrade heavier fractions into lighter, more valuable products.

• Visbreaking unit upgrades heavy residual oils by thermally cracking them into lighter, more valuable reduced viscosity products.

• Merox unit treats LPG, kerosene or jet fuel by oxidizing mercaptans to organic disulfides.

• Coking units (delayed coking, fluid coker, and flexicoker) process very heavy residual oils into gasoline and diesel fuel, leaving petroleum coke as a residual product.

• Alkylation unit produces high-octane component for gasoline blending.

• Dimerization unit converts olefins into higher-octane gasoline blending components. For example, butenes can be dimerized into isooctene which may subsequently be hydrogenated to form isooctane. There are also other uses for dimerization.

• Isomerization unit converts linear molecules to higher-octane branched molecules for blending into gasoline or feed to alkylation units.

• Steam reforming unit produces hydrogen for the hydrotreaters or hydrocracker.

• Liquified gas storage units for propane and similar gaseous fuels at pressure sufficient to maintain in liquid form. These are usually spherical vessels or bullets (horizontal vessels with rounded ends.

• Storage tanks for crude oil and finished products, usually cylindrical, with some sort of vapor emission control and surrounded by an earthen berm to contain spills.

• Amine gas treater, Claus unit, and tail gas treatment for converting hydrogen sulfide from hydrodesulfurization into elemental sulfur.

• Utility units such as cooling towers for circulating cooling water, boiler plants for steam generation, instrument air systems for pneumatically operated control valves and an electrical substation.

• Wastewater collection and treating systems consisting of API separators, dissolved air flotation (DAF) units and some type of further treatment (such as an activated sludge biotreater) to make such water suitable for reuse or for disposal.

• Solvent refining units use solvent such as cresol or furfural to remove unwanted, mainly asphaltenic materials from lubricating oil stock (or diesel stock).

• Solvent dewaxing units remove the heavy waxy constituents petrolatum from vacuum distillation products.