Petrochemicals
Introduction
Oil and gas is a huge global industry with many of the largest corporations in the world. Exploiting the oil and natural gas has been the engine of growth on the world economies providing both energy and chemical raw materials. Both are extracted from natural deposits under the ground throughout the world. They are formed from rotting natural materials subject to enormous pressures over many millennia. One consequence is that the actual chemical components of both oil and gas differ depending on where they are found. Continuous refining technology has been developed to manage these variations and separate the oil and gas into key components such as jet fuel, petrol, asphalt and gasses for downstream processing and usage. The Petrochemicals industry has developed to process these products further into products such as polymers and fibres.
The oil and gas industry faces a number of challenges and opportunities:-
-
Demand is growing for all the products while new deposits are proving more difficult and expensive to find.
-
Political pressures from the countries that own the oil.
-
Environmental concerns around the means of extraction.
-
Carbon foot print issues on usage
For these reasons and others efforts continue to focus on:-
-
Extraction of more oil and gas from existing deposits. Typically up to 50% of discovered oil and gas remains in the deposit at the end of extraction.
-
Ensuring refining always operates at the optimum points.
-
Greater control on how the oil and gas products are used to avoid waste and allow recycling where possible.
Solution
Measurement is a key challenge given the complex, and often two phase nature, of naturally occurring oil and gas.
Process tomography can deliver valuable information for a variety of processes:
-
Characterisation of multiphase flows
-
Separation of multiphase components (liquid-liquid; solid-liquid, gas-liquid etc)
-
Homogeneity of packed beds and process vessels
-
In addition process tomography can be a valuable tool in testing and validation of process models such as CFD (computational fluid dynamics).
