INDSORG Process For Desulphurization of Cracked Gasoline Feed Stocks

Petroleum refineries are facing the challenge of producing motor gasoline meeting stringent specifications w.r.t. several key properties like sulphur, olefins, and octane number etc. Gasoline from FCC accounts for over 90% of the sulfur and olefins in gasoline. Sulfur can be removed from FCC gasoline by the catalytic hydrodesulfurization (HOS) process. This process, however, requires high consumption of hydrogen and significantly reduces fuel octane number due to olefin saturation. Commercial technologies such as OCTGAIN, ISAL, SCANfining, PrimeG+, COHydro, and COHOS are available, however, these are quite complex and require multistage processing in addition to higher consumption of hydrogen. In contrast, INOSORG is a single stage, low-pressure, fixed bed reactive adsorption process (for full range feed), which consumes less hydrogen. In this process, sulfur removal takes place under elevated temperature and hydrogen environment. Regeneration is accomplished in situ by burning the adsorbed sulfur with air inside the reactor. The paper discusses the pilot studies for desulphurization of cracked gasoline feed stocks such as gasoline from FCC, Coker, Visbreaker etc. to meet ultra low sulfur «30 ppmw sulfur) specification. This process is highly economical as the capital cost would be lower due to simple configuration and low operating pressure. The operating costs would also be considerably lower as hydrogen consumption is significantly lower. In addition, there is no yield loss associated with this process.