A Happy New Year to all our readers and it’s already shaping up to be an exciting 12 months after researchers at Purdue University developed a new matrix that could reduce energy costs by millions each year.
They have demonstrated a method that rearranges the distillation sequence needed to separate crude petrol into products, showing that 70 per cent of the new sequences they identified could enable oil refineries to improve energy efficiency anywhere from six-48 per cent.
Rakesh Agrawal, the Winthrop E Stone Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering, commented that improving efficiency by just 10 per cent at a refinery processing 250,000 barrels a day would save in excess of $12million a year if oil were priced at $70 a barrel – and that’s just a single refinery. For the industry as a whole, the potential savings are massive.
The research findings were published online in the AIChE Journal with Agrawal stating that separation is a huge part of a chemical plant’s operation and improving efficiency by just a few percentage points would translate into major savings. For every 100 barrels of oil distilled, he estimates that nearly two barrels go into supplying energy for distillation.
Currently, petrol refineries have been using the same sequence for about 75 years as it is the most energy efficient of the sequences known. However, researchers believe the new sequences have the potential to consume less energy and Purdue has already filed a patent application.
