Basrah Engineering Techinical College

Insetrector: Bahiya Jabbar

Department of fuel and energy

Lecture2

The crude oil refining:

Crude must be refined in order to get the final product. All refinery units around the world
contain the following four operations in order to produce the required petroleum fraction:
Distillation
Catalytic Reforming
Cracking
Treating

1-Distillation
* The crude oil is heated and fed to a distillation column or tower.
*The columns are operated at various temperatures and pressures. Depending on the operating

pressure of the columns, they are called:

1- Atmospheric column (Crude Distillation Unit).
2-Vacum distillation columns.
*During distillation
1- The lightest materials vaporize and are collected from the top of the first atmospheric column.

2- Medium weight materials condense in the middle.

3-Heavy materials condense in the lower portion of the atmospheric column.
4-The heaviest tar-like material, called residuum, is referred to as the bottom of the barrel, and
is collected from the bottom of the column.
*The product form the medium and the bottom of the tower are transferred to different plants for
further refining.
Hint// the separation of the crude oil into various fractions depends on the temperature at a
particular location of the column. The temperature at various locations of the column is
maintained by using a variety of techniques
1

*there are two types of distillation process

1-patch distillation
2-contious distillation

Figure 1: shows the temperature and corresponding fraction for the first step of step of crude oil
distillation

2- Catalytic Reforming:
*it could define as the process of conversion the feed stream containing paraffins, olefins and
napthenes into aromatics to be used either as a motor fuel blending stock, or as a source for
specific aromatic compounds, for use in petrochemicals production.
* The product stream of the reformer is generally referred to as reformate.
*Catalytic reforming is normally facilitated by a bifunctional catalyst that is capable of
rearranging and breaking long-chain hydrocarbons as well as removing hydrogen from napthenes
to produce aromatics.
* The objective of catalytic reforming is to produce lighter aromatics so that the octane number
of the product stream increases.
3- Hydro-treater

*it could define as the process of saturating aromatics and olefins as well as to remove
undesirable compounds of elements such as sulfur and nitrogen.
* Common major elements of a hydro-treater unit are a heater, a fixed-bed catalytic reactor and a
hydrogen compressor.
* The catalyst promotes the reaction of the hydrogen with the sulfur compounds such as
mercaptans to produce hydrogen sulfide, which is then usually bled off and treated with amine in
an amine treater.
* The hydrogen also saturated hydrocarbon double bonds which helps raise the stability of the
fuel.
4-Cracking or Thermal Cracking
In the refining technology the Cracking process is defined as the process of using heat or heat
combined with another factors in order to change and break the petroleums hydrocarbon bonds
to form a new products with a lower molecular weight.