Nilesh Chandak
Takreer Research Centre, Abu Dhabi
Title: Pilot plant experimentation to optimize the use of re-generated CoMo catalyst to process atmospheric and vacuum gas oils
Biography
Biography: Nilesh Chandak
Abstract
TAKREER Research Centre (TRC) has conducted a feasibility study on regenerated CoMo catalyst for various possible re-use viz. for naphtha hydrotreating, Kero and ULSD production. This paper focuses on the pilot plant testing of regenerated CoMo catalyst for ULSD production by processing LVGO & HGO blends at various ratios for re-use in another hydrotreater unit of refinery. Regenerated catalyst, which was unloaded from commercial hydrotreater after its turnaround, was evaluated using four different blends of LVGO & HGO. During entire experimentation, process conditions viz. 0.5 h-1 LHSV, 57 bar pressure and 300 Nm3/m3 H2/Oil ratio, were unchanged while feed & temperature were variable parameters. Based on the pilot study results, we anticipated processing LVGO with HGO blend feed needs 5°C to 10°C higher activity comparing with full HGO feed. Estimation of hydrogen consumption & cycle life cycle of the catalyst along with detailed experimentation has been discussed. Details of hydro processing pilot plant design, operation and data analysis are mentioned in which operating conditions were tuned to commercial unit. The experimental results have shown the effective techniques to validate the regenerated CoMo catalyst testing at pilot scale for optimized re-use in commercial refinery.
