PETROLEUM COKE GASIFICATION: A REVIEW

The production of petroleum coke (petcoke) in the refineries is progressively peaking up because of the trend of processing heavy crudes and in turn, a renewed interest in delayed coking process. Therefore, an efficient, economical, and environmentally safe utilisation of petcoke has become imperative in the current petroleum refining scenario. Gasification of petcoke has emerged as one of the attractive options and is gaining increasing attention to convert the petcoke to value-added products. The process offers the refiners a variety of product slates mainly via synthesis gas route. The products include steam, hydrogen, electricity, chemicals (viz. methanol, ammonia, etc.), liquid fuels via Fischer-Tropsch (F-T) synthesis and so on. Petcoke has been identified as a potential feedstock for about 15% of the total planned gasification capacity worldwide. In the present communication, the published literature pertaining to petcoke gasification has been extensively analysed and a state-of-the-art review has been written that includes: (1) the importance of petcoke gasification in the present petroleum refining scenario; (2) petcoke gasification reaction mechanism, kinetics, and typical product profile; (3) parametric sensitivity of the operating variables such as temperature and pressure; (4) various gasifiers for petcoke gasification; (5) modelling efforts on different types of gasifiers and (6) future prospects of petcoke gasification. An attempt has been made to get the afore-mentioned aspects together in a thematic framework so that the information is available at a glance and is expected to be useful as a single point source to the researchers and practicing refiners.