24-08-2021

JSC Gazprom conference abstracts

Sustainable processing of associated petroleum gas can become an additional source of profit for gas processing plants. In particular, butane and pentane fractions have growing commercial potential. SIE Neftehim, LLC has developed catalytic isomerization processes that give the maximum yield of the target fraction of individual hydrocarbons: n-butane, n-pentane, or isobutane and isopentane of high purity from NGL feed.

In recent years, a clear tendency to increase ecological safety of high-octane motor gasoline production and to scale-up petrochemical facilities is observed in the oil refining and petrochemical world market.

As a rule, companies focused on the motor fuels production have an increased demand for isobutane to obtain alkylate as one of the promising high-octane components of motor gasoline. The indisputable advantages of alkylate include a high octane number — 94-98 RON, a low vapor pressure — not more than 20 kPa and absence of olefins, aromatics, sulfur and nitrogen-containing compounds. Isobutane is in demand as a feed for production of butyl rubber, oxygenates (MTBE and ETBE).

Additional amounts of isobutane can be obtained by using the technology for catalytic isomerization of n-butane to isobutane. To address this issue, SIE Neftehim, LLC developed the Isomalk-3 technology, which has been already proven in the industry as one of the most efficient solutions.

High-purity isopentane produced using Isomalk-2 technology can be applied both as an independent high-octane non-aromatic component of motor gasoline, and as a feed for alkylate and isoprene production.

In petrochemical plants, n-butane and n-pentane are valuable feed for pyrolysis units, providing a high yield of ethylene, propylene and n-butene used for production of polymers. The economic efficiency of using NGL as a feed for ethylene production is low due to the high content of isobutane, which is an undesirable component of pyrolysis feed.

To address this issue, SIE Neftehim, LLC developed the reverse isomerization technology Isomalk-3R, which allows highly efficiently converting the excess isobutane to n-butane, and the Isomalk-6R technology, which allows producing n-pentane by catalytic normalization (reverse isomerization) of isopentane.

The use of normalization technologies allows increasing ethylene production by more than 2 times in comparison with use of isobutane fraction as a pyrolysis feed.

Isomalk technologies have a number of significant advantages over technologies based on chlorinated alumina catalysts:
  - no need to supply chlorinating agents;
  - the highly active catalytic system is resistant to the effects of poisons and impurities;
  - the guaranteed service life of the catalyst exceeds the average statistical service life of the chlorinated catalytic system by more than twice (the achieved service life of this catalyst type is 18 years).
  - the obtained product does not contain trace impurities, including chlorine, sulfur.

Thus, NGL processing with production of pure paraffinic hydrocarbons fractions using Isomalk technologies will allow increasing efficiency of gas processing companies.