STUDY ON DEASPHAL TING AND DEMETALATION OF HEAVY PETROLEUM RESIDUE: PART1

Nowadays attention is focused on the production of fuel, conform the standered specification, which to be friendly environment. This lead to be encouragement the research in the field of convert the heavy petroleum products into clean fuels. Most of the Egyptian oils are quit heavy with poor yield and quality of light distillate. Solvent deasphalting process permits practically recovering much higher heavier oils and extracts well the high purity deasphalting oil from atmospheric or vacuum residues.
In this study, the effect of temperature and solvent feed ratio on the quality of the vacuum petroleum residual have been investigated, solvent deasphalting process was carried out in a batch autoclave at different temperatures 40ºC, 60ºC and 80ºC using basic n-paraffins solvent (n- pentane) at n- pentane/residue ratios 3:1, 5:1 and 8:1 with auxiliary polar solvent N-methyl 2-pyrolidone (NMP) at different NMP/residue ratios 0.25:1, 0.50:1, 1:1 and 2:1
Treating vacuum petroleum residues with n-pentane and NMP results in a deasphalted oil with reduced amounts of heavy metals and conradson carbon.
The most promising conditions of deasphalited oil is obtained by using n-pentane ratio of 8:1 and NMP ratio of 0.5:1 at 80ºC.