Browsing by Author "Chen, Shize"

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    Catalytic Heavy Crude Upgrading under Methane Environment
    (2019-09-18) Chen, Shize; Song, Hua; Hu, Jinguang
    As a rich and important resource in Canada, heavy oil has the disadvantage of being transportable by pipeline because of its high viscosity. It would be of great importance to upgrade the heavy oil for potential transportation and usages. Instead of the conventional hydrogen used in hydrocracking, this thesis focused on the heavy oil upgrading by methane. In this thesis, various catalysts have been developed for the upgrading. Detailed physical and chemical properties of several types of heavy oil and their upgraded products were well characterized such as viscosity, density, and total acid value, etc. A good performance and simple version of catalyst was optimized to be 1 wt% Ag-5 wt% Mo-10 wt% Ce/HZSM-5. After the upgrading, it was confirmed that the viscosity of some heavy oil could be considerably lowered to less than 300 cP to meet the requirements for pipeline transportation. In addition, a very difficult raw feed of oil mud was also included for the upgrading in this thesis, which proved this upgrading approach by using methane can be expanded to other heavy oil feeds. Furthermore, octylbenzene was used as a model compound to run the upgrading reaction to further understand the reaction mechanism. This thesis proved that our optimized catalyst could generally upgrade heavy oil at mild conditions together with methane instead of hydrogen. It showed potential industrial applications.