By Emily Newton, www.revolutionized.com

Sulfur-laden sour crude oil is an intensive resource to produce. Engineers, chemical workers, wastewater professionals and more rely on these products for petrochemicals or fuel. The applications are diverse, yet the industry has leveraged the same, inefficient process for ages.

The workforce must learn how to process crude oil in a more energy-efficient and sustainable manner if it continues to try and stay relevant in these markets. How do the challenges in this industry prevent its progress, and how could it overcome them to optimise?

Seeing sour crude oil’s challenge

Why does sour crude oil need optimising in the first place, and how has the industry failed to consider these hurdles?

Corrosion

Sour crude oil is corrosive by nature because of its high sulfur content compared to the sweeter alternatives. Pipelines and storage tanks degrade over time, causing operations to be expensive and resource-intensive from frequent replacements and maintenance costs. This also increases the number of safety risks workers interact with regularly.

Cost

These factors make sour crude oil transportation and processing expensive, especially when moving sour crude oil causes 60% of failures due to corrosion. Many extraction sites are in remote locations and accessibility to adequate infrastructure is sparse. Obtaining access to these resources may require high upfront costs to connect assets or delivery delays by hiring third-party help.

Carbon footprint

The environmental impact is the most notable opportunity for optimisation and lean processing. The sulfur dioxide emissions and hydrogen sulfide alone are cause for concern. The emissions lead to higher carbon footprints for the industry, but it is another safety deterrent for workers inside and outside the sector. Crude oil processing may cause respiratory ailments.

Compatibility

The sulfur content and composition of sour crude oil from multiple locations make it complicated to combine and treat them at the same time. The varied blends could emulsify at different times or change states of matter during transportation. Crude oil blending needs to be optimised to make the market more flexible.

Refining refinement to remove pain points

Sour crude oil formation requires a lengthy organic process. Companies must wait for kerogen to form from dead organisms and sedimentation. Then, created hydrocarbons have to travel to accessible reservoirs before companies can access them by drilling and extracting them.

Creation already takes millions of years, so corporations relying on oil cannot afford to wait. With over 160 crude oil types being traded, refining sour crude oil processing would be a significant win for industry wide productivity and cost enhancements. They also cannot destroy environments and reservoirs, otherwise they risk pollution and biodiversity losses.

Extraction and transport

Therefore, extraction requires noninvasive, efficient methods to make this step more streamlined. Enhanced oil recovery techniques, like water flooding, remove drills from the equation. Instead of looking below, oil workers could collect sour crude oil from surface seepage. Though this is limited to specific areas, it should be the default if it is accessible to make sourcing faster and less destructive. Other options include:

  • Microbial-enhanced oil recovery
  • Electromagnetic heating
  • Stream injection
  • Geothermal energy utilisation

Transporting oil in extensive pipeline systems made of nonresistant metals makes production even more inefficient. This includes titanium, stainless steel and alloys with protective coatings. This lean approach promotes waste minimization by preserving and extending the life span of transportation infrastructure.

Removing sulfur and impurities

The practices for how to process crude oil also need to shift. Some sour crude oil varieties are more sulfuric than others, needing more advanced refining processes. Removing sulfur with techniques like hydrotreating requires tons of energy and pressure to achieve. Desulfurization units and catalytic converters are both capable of removing it with a lower carbon footprint.

Desalting is another necessary step for removing impurities, further complicating the process. The market standard method, electrostatic separation, consumes copious amounts of energy. Sometimes, operating conditions are not considerate enough of the temperatures or strength of the electric field, making it use more resources than it should.

Fractionation and distillation

Fractionation for specific use cases requires careful separation and boiling of the crude oil. For example, kerosene for jet fuel and residuum for asphalt need to be injected into separate heating stills to make it usable. If products need to be more lightweight or malleable, requiring reforming or cracking, then processing continues to delay attentiveness to rising market demands.

Optimising sour crude oil with an environmental perspective

Making sour crude oil more eco-friendly, albeit a contradiction, is possible with data. If refineries know how much hydrogen sulfide content is in the stores beforehand, then oil companies obtain several benefits. First, more detailed crude analytics boosts internal knowledge and familiarity with the product.

It also makes metrics more concrete and informs workers where optimisation is most critical. If the sourness of oil rises over time, advanced desulfurisation equipment is the priority. Sensors that measure this data are leagues better than paper measuring and manual sample dilutions for discovering hydrogen sulfide content.

Distilling also uses fewer resources if machinery uses coalescer designs. If the droplets are larger and warmer, they have less resistance to form. Optimising droplet coalescence makes separators use less energy. Additionally, producers could capture any heat processing technologies produced, utilising recovery systems. Integrating heat capture with renewable energy optimises sour crude oil further by promoting circularity and a closed loop.

Biorefining is another industry innovation that uses biological processes to refine sour crude oil instead of chemicals or destructive methods. One study used bioconversion to create hydrogen gas instead of gasoline from crude oil hydrocarbons. Many oil reservoirs are in the stage where human consumption is outpacing its output. Making gasoline from crude oil only has a 43% efficiency rate, when bioconversion gets more out of these limited resources.

How to process crude oil smarter

Crude oil processing, primarily for sour varieties, demands extensive infrastructure and energy-intensive practices to make the product usable. Numerous influences are causing stressors in the industry, including higher demands, volatile pricing and environmental compliance.

If oil companies intend to stay in operation, they must innovate and invest in leaner, smarter and more energy-efficient technologies and tactics. Otherwise, they will pull oil and ruin environments for uninterested customers.