ABSTRACT
The influx of viscous feedstocks such as heavy oil, extra heavy oil, and tar sand bitumen into refineries creates, and will continue to create challenges but, at the same time, it also creates opportunities by improving the ability of refineries to handle viscous feedstocks thereby enhancing refinery flexibility to meet the increasingly stringent product specifications for refined fuels. (Speight, 2013a, 2014a, 2014b). Upgrading viscous feedstocks is an increasingly prevalent means of extracting the maximum amount of liquid fuels from each barrel of crude oil that enters the refinery. Although solvent deasphalting processes (Chapter 14) and coking processes (Chapter 10) are used in refineries to upgrade viscous feedstocks to intermediate products (which are then processed further) to produce transportation fuels, the integration of viscous feedstock processing units and gasification presents some unique synergies that will enhance the performance of the future refinery by preparing otherwise difficult to refine feedstocks to feedstocks that are suitable for the production of petrochemicals (Figures 5.1 and 5.2) (Wallace et al., 1998; Furimsky, 1999; Penrose et al., 1999; Gray and Tomlinson, 2000; Abadie and Chamorro, 2009; Wolff and Vliegenthart, 2011; Speight, 2011b, 2014a).
