Compared to modern fossil‐fuel‐based refineries, the emerging electrocatalytic refinery (e‐refinery) is a more sustainable and environmentally benign strategy to convert renewable feedstocks and ...energy sources into transportable fuels and value‐added chemicals. A crucial step in conducting e‐refinery processes is the development of appropriate reactions and optimal electrocatalysts for efficient cleavage and formation of chemical bonds. However, compared to well‐studied primary reactions (e.g., O2 reduction, water splitting), the mechanistic aspects and materials design for emerging complex reactions are yet to be settled. To address this challenge, herein, we first present fundamentals of heterogeneous electrocatalysis and some primary reactions, and then implement these to establish the framework of e‐refinery by coupling in situ generated intermediates (integrated reactions) or products (tandem reactions). We also present a set of materials design principles and strategies to efficiently manipulate the reaction intermediates and pathways.
The concept of the electrocatalytic refinery (e‐refinery) is an intrinsically sustainable strategy to convert renewable feedstocks and energy sources to transportable fuels and value‐added chemicals. This Review describes the concept, fundamentals, and framework of e‐refinery processes with some game‐changing reactions and innovative catalyst design strategies.
•MDC was successfully used to treat PRW, generate electricity and desalinate salt water.•Bioelectricity generation increases at low catholyte pH and high saltwater conductivity.•Maximum COD removal ...was achieved using salt solution concentration of 20g/L.•SEM images confirmed the presence of microbial film on the anode and AEM surface.
Petroleum refinery wastewater (PRW) contains a high concentration of pollutants and may pose serious environmental risks. Conventional treatment methods of PRW are energy intensive, and thus there is an urgent need to develop sustainable technologies. Microbial desalination cells (MDCs) represent a new energy-efficient technology for simultaneous treatment of PRW and seawater. In this study, PRW was for the first time treated in an MDC and the effects of salt concentration and catholyte were studied. The maximum COD removal was achieved by the MDC using an initial salt concentration of 20g/L NaCl solution, and the COD removal increased slightly from 64.0% to 70.5% when the catholyte was changed from phosphate buffer solution (PBS) to acidified water. The maximum desalination efficiency of 19.9% was obtained by an MDC operated with real seawater and PBS. Acidified water was found to be an efficient catholyte in terms of specific energy production. When desalinating real seawater, the highest total energy produced was 32.6Wh/kg COD with respect to COD removal or 9.5Wh/m3 with respect to the total volume of the desalinated water. These results demonstrated that complex PRW could be used as an anodic substrate in MDCs for electricity generation and seawater desalination.
•Oil refineries have a large number of accidents with human error involvement.•HRA methodologies developed for NPPs may not reflect oil industry operations.•Phoenix-PRO is an HRA methodology specific ...for oil refineries operation.•Phoenix-PRO is a robust model-based HRA methodology.•It includes CRT, failure modes and PIFs tailored for oil refining operations.
The oil industry has grown in terms of quantity of facilities and process complexity. However, human and material losses still occur due to major accidents, and many of which involve human failures. These failures can be identified, modeled and quantified through Human Reliability Analysis (HRA). The most advanced HRA methods have been developed and applied in nuclear power plants, while the petroleum industry has mainly focused on process safety in terms of technical aspects of the operation and equipment. The existing HRA methodologies may not reflect the idiosyncrasies of refining and petrochemical plants regarding the interaction of the operators with the plant, their failure modes, and the factors that influence them. This paper builds on Phoenix HRA Methodology to develop a methodology specific for Petroleum Refining Operations (Phoenix-PRO). It uses as basis the Hybrid Causal Logic model, with Event Sequence Diagrams, Fault Trees and Bayesian Belief Networks. Phoenix-PRO development relied on interviews with HRA specialists, visitations to a refinery and its control room, and analysis of past oil refineries accidents. The use of this methodology for HRA of oil refineries and petrochemical plants operations can enhance this industry safety and allow for solid risk-based decisions.
Multiobjective optimization (MOO) techniques are of much interest with their applications to petroleum refinery catalytic processes for finding optimal solutions in the midst of conflicting ...objectives. The rationale behind using MOO is that if objectives are in conflict, a set of trade-off optimal modeling solutions must be obtained to help management select the most-preferred operational solution for a refinery process. Using MOO does not involve hyperparameters thereby reducing the expensive parameter tuning tasks. A true MOO method allows numerous Pareto-based optimal solutions to be identified so that management and decision-makers' preference information can be used to finally select a single preferred solution. This review discusses MOO algorithms and their applications in petroleum and refinery processes. The survey provides insights into the fundamentals, metrics, and relevant algorithms conceived for MOO in petroleum and refinery fields. Also, it provides a deeper discussion of state-of-the-art research conducted to optimize conflicting objectives simultaneously for three main refinery processes, namely hydrotreating, desulfurization, and cracking. Finally, several research and application directions specific to refinery processes are discussed.
•The emerging virgin crude-to-chemicals technology (CTC) can provide an opportunity for integrating operational refineries with chemicals.•Producing sustainable feed for the chemical and ...petrochemicals.•The refinery feedstocks have a gradual shift toward heavier crudes and residue.•A combination of both thermal and catalytic processes can also be used to achieve the effective utilization.
In recent years, the oil market has witnessed high volatility due to unstable demand and supply. Considering the price volatility and stricter environmental regulations, there is a possibility of a decline in the demand for transportation fuels, which will force refiners to explore alternate ways to improve the yield of high-value products, to keep their margins high. In recent years, demand for petrochemicals has witnessed tremendous growth, and there is a dynamic market for olefins and monomeric (building blocks) hydrocarbons. The emerging virgin crude-to-chemicals (CTC) technology can provide an opportunity for integrating operational refineries with chemicals. The integration of refining with the production of high value-petrochemicals can lead to a framework that will add value to both sectors (upstream and downstream). Integration has been proven to be environmentally driven by utilizing various refinery waste and by-products. The importance of thermal and catalytic processes in the integrated refinery is high, particularly the process of integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) that generates electricity and by-product as a feedstock for chemicals. On the other hand, high demand for petrochemicals indicated a predictable growth in recent years, mainly driven by the commodity product requirement. Hence, this review critically discusses the current oil price variation, heavy oil production, and technical challenges to convert heavy crude to chemical (c-t-c) or petrochemical (c-t-p). Moreover, considerable flexibility is emphasized as a holistic approach to deal with unconventional feedstock (using thermal and catalytic methods) to produce sustainable feed for the chemical and petrochemicals.
Abstract The main purpose of this research endeavor is to reduce lead concentrations in the wastewater of an oil refinery through the utilization of a material composed of oyster shell waste ...(MIL-100(Fe)/ Cygnea /Fe 3 O 4 /TiO 2 . Initially, iron oxide nanoparticles (Fe 3 O 4 ) were synthesized via solvent-thermal synthesis. It was subsequently coated layer by layer with the organic–metallic framework MIL-100 (Fe) using the core–shell method. Additionally, the solvent-thermal method was utilized to integrate TiO 2 nanoparticles into the magnetic organic–metallic framework’s structure. Varieties of analytical analysis were utilized to investigate the physical and chemical properties of the synthetic final photocatalyst. Nitrogen adsorption and desorption technique (BET), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), scanning electron diffraction pattern (XRD), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Following the characterization of the final photocatalyst, the physical and chemical properties of the nanoparticles synthesized in each step, several primary factors that significantly affect the removal efficiency in the advanced oxidation system (AOPs) were examined. These variables consist of pH, photocatalyst dosage, lead concentration, and reaction temperature. The synthetic photocatalyst showed optimal performance in the removal of lead from petroleum wastewater under the following conditions: 35 °C temperature, pH of 3, 0.04 g/l photocatalyst dosage, and 100 mg/l wastewater concentration. Additionally, the photocatalyst maintained a significant level of reusability after undergoing five cycles. The findings of the study revealed that the photocatalyst dosage and pH were the most influential factors in the effectiveness of lead removal. According to optimal conditions, lead removal reached a maximum of 96%. The results of this investigation showed that the synthetic photocatalyst, when exposed to UVA light, exhibited an extraordinary capacity for lead removal.
Display omitted
•Petroleum refinery wastewater is poorly treated in CSTR.•Higher performance treatment was achieved in MBR inoculated with the same consortium than CSTR.•Biomass concentration ...increased rapidly in MBR but declined in the CSTR due to high toxicity.•The MBR presented a higher bacterial abundance and diversity than the CSTR.•Identification of major acclimated bacterial genera in the MBR could explain its high performance treatment.
This study evaluated firstly the performance of the Continuous Stirred Tank bioReactor system (CSTR) for the treatment of highly toxic petroleum refinery wastewaters at the pilot-scale. The reduction of the COD, BOD5, phenols, and the total petroleum hydrocarbon (TPH) reached 82.10%, 85.87%, 91.63%, and 81.11%, respectively at high hydraulic residence time (HRT = 10 days). Decreasing HRT to 5 and 2.5 days led to a decrease in the efficiency of the process and a decrease in biomass concentration was also observed (<1000 mg/l). We investigated to test Membrane Bioreactor (MBR) configuration inoculated with the same microbial consortium of CSTR. Therefore, the removal efficiency reached 89.14% of COD and biomass concentration increased to 2800 mg/l at HRT = 1 day. Microbial biomass showed high acclimatization to the toxic wastewater. Communities’ abundance and composition in CSTR and MBR were then performed using culture-independents approaches (qPCR, Illumina Miseq sequencing, and DGGE) based on the 16S rRNA gene sequencing. Results showed that major genera affiliated with Betaproteobacteria and Gammaproteobacteria were commonly shared in both bioreactors. The MBR presented a higher bacterial abundance and diversity than the CSTR. Furthermore, dominant genera belonging to Alphaproteobacteria and Bacteroidetes were exclusively detected in CSTR and MBR, respectively. Six potential hydrocabonclastic bacteria were isolated from the CSTR. This study demonstrates the occurrence of specific acclimated bacterial communities in MBR different from those identified in CSTR, improving the petroleum hydrocarbon wastewater treatment. The results would be useful in developing an MBR system for treating toxic stripped wastewater at a larger scale.
Uncertainty in refinery planning presents a significant challenge in determining the day‐to‐day operations of an oil refinery. Deterministic modeling techniques often fail to account for this ...uncertainty, potentially resulting in reduced profit. The stochastic programming framework explicitly incorporates parameter uncertainty in the problem formulation, thus giving preference to robust solutions. In this work, a nonlinear, multiperiod, industrial refinery problem is extended to a two‐stage stochastic problem, formulated as a mixed‐integer nonlinear program. A crude‐oil sequencing case study is developed with binary scheduling decisions in both stages of the stochastic programming problem. Solution via a decomposition strategy based on the generalized Benders decomposition (GBD) algorithm is proposed. The binary decisions are designated as complicating variables that, when fixed, reduce the full‐space problem to a series of independent scenario subproblems. Through the application of the GBD algorithm, a feasible mixed‐integer solution is obtained that is more robust to uncertainty than its deterministic counterpart.
In this study, WO
3
microspheres, with special morphology and structure of porous hollow spheres constructed from WO
3
nanoparticles, were composited with thin PVA layer of PC/PVA thin film ...nanocomposite membrane by dip-coating technique, and was used for treatment of the oil refinery wastewater. The obtained results indicates that, the best separation performance was observed for the thin film nanocomposite membrane, containing 0.05 wt% of WO3 nanoparticles. The flux recovery ratio of this sample is 88.64% which is 66.8% higher than that of the PVC membrane. And this sample with rejection percentage of 80.39%, shows an about 27.8% rejection improvement, compared to the bare PVC membrane. Total fouling ratio of this nanocomposite membrane is 34.09% which is about 69.6% lower than that of the PVC membrane. The neat PVC membrane has the high porosity and large pore size, however, this membrane has the low hydrophilicity, and high adsorption of organic pollutants, and this sample has high fouling capability, and consequently has low permeation performance for treatment of the oil refinery wastewater. On the other hand, the thin film nanocomposite membranes containing WO
3
nanostructures, have an extra dense nanocomposite PVA thin layer on their surface, and despite of the low porosity and small pore size of these membranes, they have high permeation performance, and increased of hydrophilicity. The improved hydrophilicity, increases the rejection of organic pollutants from the membrane surface and consequently decreases the membrane fouling.
Vegetable oil refinery waste containing acid oil is used as an inexpensive feedstock for producing biodiesel by microwave‐assisted esterification (MAE) method. Effects of some main variables such as ...free fatty acid:methanol molar ratio (1:1, 1:5, and 1:10), reaction time (5, 30, and 60 min), and catalyst concentration (1%, 2%, and 3%) on physicochemical properties of produced biodiesel are investigated. Optimum reaction conditions of MAE are free fatty acid:methanol molar ratio of 1:10, reaction time of 60 min, and a catalyst concentration of 3%, while having 95.79% conversion yield. By increasing the conversion yield of the biodiesel, density and color brightness increase, while viscosity and refractive index decrease. There are no significant differences between physicochemical and heating properties of biodiesel produced by MAE and magnetic stirrer esterification (MSE) methods. Meanwhile, energy consumption of MAE method is almost four times lower than that of MSE. MAE as a promising alternative to the conventional esterification method can be considered as an energy‐efficient method for producing biodiesel from inexpensive vegetable oil refinery waste.
Practical applications: Acid oil is an inexpensive by‐product of alkali refining in vegetable oil plants that would pollute the environment if not rendered safely. In this study, MAE is used to convert acid oil to biodiesel as a practical process for bringing alkali refining waste into production cycle. Acid oil can provide a reduction in the cost of biodiesel production. In addition, application of energy‐efficient MAE method can facilitate the economical production of biodiesel.
Vegetable oil refinery waste containing acid oil is used for biodiesel production. Acid‐catalyzed esterification of acid oil is performed by a microwave‐assisted reactor to produce biodiesel. Optimum reaction condition of microwave‐assisted esterification reaction is compared with the conventional method. Energy consumption of conventional method is significantly higher than microwave‐assisted esterification method. Using energy‐efficient microwave‐assisted esterification as an alternative method for biodiesel production from inexpensive oil refinery waste can reduce the production cost, which is the major obstacle in biodiesel production commercialization.
