CHEMICAL ENGINEERING TRANSACTIONS VOL. 76, 2019 A publication of The Italian Association of Chemical Engineering Online at www.aidic.it/cet Guest Editors: Petar S. Varbanov, Timothy G. Walmsley, Jiří J. Klemeš, Panos Seferlis Copyright © 2019, AIDIC Servizi S.r.l. I SBN 978-88-95608-73-0; I SSN 2283-9216 Economic Assessment of a Crude Oil Hydrotreating Process Wissam Muhsin*, Jie Zhang Midland Refineries Company, Daura Refinery, Baghdad, Iraq School of Engineering, Merz Court, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, United Kingdom w.a.muhsin2@newcaslte.ac.uk This paper presents the economic assessment of a crude oil hydrotreating process with a crude distillation unit. The hydrotreating of crude oil is a novel process that has great economic potential but has not been implemented widely in practice, where all the conventional hydrotreating processes are carried on each oil product separately. This new hydrotreating process of crude oil seeks to save costs and energy in crude oil refineries. The economics of this new process are compared with those of the conventional crude distillation unit where hydrotreating is conducted on each oil fraction individually. The results show that this new process of hydrotreating of the crude oil has an overall annual cost much less than that of the conventional process. 1. Introduction Petroleum is still a major source of energy in the world (Behrens and Datye, 2013). It is a complex mixture of a large number of various hydrocarbons. The aim of the crude oil refining processes is to convert petroleum into beneficial oil products such as gasoline, kerosene, gas oil, diesel, and reduced crude (Danyelle et al., 2016). A crude oil refinery consists of different operating units such as crude distillation unit (CDU), hydrotreating (HDT), catalytic reforming units, Hydrodesulphurisation units (HDS), isomerisation units (Isom), kerosene hydrotreating units (KHT), fluid catalytic cracking (FCC), vacuum distillation units (VDU), hydrocracking units (HCK), alkylation units, coker units and others (Hsu and Robinson, 2017). In petroleum refineries, the primary purpose of HDT is to reduce the undesirable impurities, such as sulphur, nitrogen, oxygen and some other compounds (Ancheyta, 2013). In an HDT process, there are several variables and process parameters, which are feedstock, reaction temperature, pressure, liquid hourly space velocity (LHSV), and H 2 /Oil ratio. Generally, HDT processes are conducted in fixed-bed reactors, and some of the HDT units operate under more severe operating conditions than others, depending on the type of feedstock (Nawaf et al., 2015). Operating conditions for HDT should be carefully chosen to obtain the best process performance (Jarullah et al., 2011).Over the past thirty years, there has been a dramatic increase in environmental concerns as a result of hazardous emissions from industries, particularly petroleum refineries (Sunita and Vivek, 2017). The increasingly stringent environmental regulations have increased the cost of producing clean oil products (Muhsin et al., 2016). Most refineries continuously try to improve and upgrade existing operating units or use new technology to meet the increasingly stringent environmental regulations which impose strict constraints on the quality and specification of oil products. Changes in operation units are made in response to internal and external categories which affect modern refineries ( Khor and Elkamel, 2013). This motivates the work for producing petroleum products by using non-conventional techniques, such as by HDT of the whole crude oil. The economic analysis of an industrial refining unit, which involves the HDT of the crude oil process was studied by (Jarullah et al., 2012). However, they ignored some important economic parameters that are needed to evaluate the new process. Examples of these parameters are utility analysis and energy savings. The HDT of crude oil is a new process which has not been studied widely in the literature, where all the conventional HDT processes are conducted on each fraction separately, for instance, HDT of naphtha, HDT of kerosene, HDT of gas oil, and not on the whole petroleum. The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 gives the main chemical reactions in the HDT reactors. Section 3 describes the Aspen economic assessment. Comparison of the crude oil HDT process with CDU and conventional CDU with HDT on individual oil product is presented in Section 4. The last section draws some conclusions. The comparison results show that the 481 DOI: 10.3303/CET1976081 Paper Received: 27/02/2019; Revised: 29/06/2019; Accepted: 09/07/2019 Please cite this article as: Muhsin W., Zhang J., 2019, Economic Assessment of a Crude Oil Hydrotreating Process, Chemical Engineering Transactions, 76, 481-486 DOI:10.3303/CET1976081