Techno-economic assessment of crude oil gasification

Last few decades observed decrease in the quality of the extracted crude oil. Moreover, heavy crudes are cumbersome to refine with conventional processes due to the production of high sulfur residues and low light distillates. Their combustion also generates significant pollutants including particulates, sulfur and nitrous oxides. Gasification is a potential pathway for the declining quality of the crude oil and avoiding environmentally harmful residuals. Here, the technical viability of gasifying different crude oil was investigated with numerical and equilibrium analysis, and the output performance was compared to the gasification of baseline coal. The equilibrium model is based on elemental mass and energy conservations. The assessment of the influence of different parameters such as equivalence ratio, crude oil type and operating temperature on the efficiency of the gasification process was conducted. Results reveal a high gasification efficiency similar to 77% which surpasses the coal efficiency (similar to 73%). Furthermore, similar sensitivity trend was observed for both fuels with varying moderator and oxidizer conditions. Devolatilization kinetics of crude oil was determined to run high-fidelity gasification. The third order Coats-Redfern provided the best fit method with dual kinetics for the activation energies and frequency factors of 463.648 kJ/mole and 1.455E+56 s(-1), 276.408 kJ/mole and 3.325E+20 s(-1) and 96.281 kJ/mole and 5.186E+03 s(-1) for the light-, semi- and heavy crudes, respectively. Furthermore, gasification economics assessment of crude oils was conducted given their technical viability and environmental advantages. Using the current crude oil price of about $80/barrel ($0.588/kg) and considering the local sensible energy price in UAE (i.e., 38 fils/kWh) (similar to $0.10354/kWh), the process shows potential economic viability between 1150 degrees C and 1300 degrees C.