ABSTRACT

Desulfurization as practiced in petroleum reneries is a catalytic process that is widely used to remove sulfur from petroleum feedstocks, rened petroleum products, and natural gas (Jones, 1995; Speight and Ozum, 2002; Parkash, 2003; Hsu and Robinson, 2006; Mokhatab et al., 2006; Gary et al., 2007; Speight, 2014). The purpose of removing the sulfur is to reduce the emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO2), which also converts to sulfur trioxide (SO3) in the presence of oxygen, when fuels or petroleum products are used in automotive fuels and fuel oils, as well as fuels for railroad locomotives, ships, gas or oil burning power plants, residential and industrial furnaces, and any other forms of fuel combustion. In addition, the increase in the use of high-sulfur feedstock in reneries (and the regulations restricting the amount of sulfur in fuels and other products) is reected in the increase in capacity during the last 32 years of renery desulfurization processes from 6,781,060 barrels/day in 1982 to 17,094,540 barrels/day at the end of 2014 (Energy Information Administration, 2015).