Mini-refinery

Purpose

A mini-refinery allows you to obtain commercial petroleum products where it is not economically feasible to build a large plant: in remote fields, with small production volumes, for processing gas condensate and when disposing of substandard raw materials.

Typical capacity is from 20 to 500 thousand tons per year. The upper limit is determined by the economy: with increasing power, the classical scheme with deep processing is more profitable.

Typical composition

• block for receiving and preparing raw materials, dehydration and desalting;
• tube furnace and atmospheric distillation column;
• gasoline fraction stabilization unit;
• if necessary, a vacuum unit, hydrotreating, isomerization or reforming unit;
• storage park, loading and flare system;
• control room, instrumentation and automated process control systems.

Raw materials and products

The raw materials are crude oil, including heavy oil, gas condensate and their mixtures. Basic set of products: gasoline fraction (naphtha), diesel fraction, fuel oil. When hydrotreating is added, the diesel fraction is brought to the sulfur requirements; when reforming or isomerization is added, it is brought to the octane number requirements.

Design Features

• block-modular layout reduces the construction period and the volume of construction and installation work on the site;
• the degree of processing is lower than that of large factories, so the depth of processing is set by the economy, and not by the maximum yield of light beans;
• the requirements for raw materials and stability of product quality are higher: a small installation is more sensitive to fluctuations in oil composition;
• mandatory systems - drainage tank, torch, wastewater treatment, fire protection.

Communication with other processes

A mini-refinery is almost always built aroundatmospheric distillation. Further expansion is vacuum distillation of fuel oil, hydrotreating of the diesel fraction, catalytic reforming or isomerization for gasoline, as well as the production of bitumen from tar.