MAXIMUM VALUE FROM HEAVY REFINERY RESIDUES
SDA PLUS - Solvent Deasphalting
Solvent Deasphalting (SDA) is an innovative technology for deasphalting of heavy refinery residues through solvent extraction. It utilizes various solvents (ranging from C3 to C6 and their mixtures) in a single-stage or two-stage process
Due to stricter environmental regulations and the trend toward processing heavy crude oils, refinery operators are constantly seeking new ways to nearly completely convert their heavy residues. Increasingly, new solutions for deeper residue processing based on solvent extraction are coming into focus.
Technology overview
Feedstocks include: Residues from crude oil processing, such as vacuum residue or hydrocracker residue (unconverted oil), heavy used oils, bunker fuels or FCC residues (heavy recycle oil)
With the SDA PLUS technology developed by EDL, valuable products such as Deasphalted Oil (DAO), pitch, and resin are obtained from heavy refinery residues through solvent extraction.
Products of the SDA PLUS technology include deasphalted oil (DAO), bright stock, and residue (pitch), which consists of resins and asphalt.
DAO is further processed in a hydrocracker (HC, RHX) or a fluid catalytic cracker (FCC) into fuels or refined in a lubricating oil refinery as bright stock into base oils. The residue is used for bitumen production.
SDA PLUS offers decisive advantages over conventional SDA processes:
- Optimal product qualities with high process efficiency through the use of state-of-the-art extractor internals
- Optimization of existing SDA units with SDA PLUS, resulting in yield increase of up to 10 percent
- Savings of up to 25 percent in operating costs with SDA PLUS compared to conventional SDA technologies
- Extremely low investment costs compared to other residue upgrading technologies, such as hydrocracking, coking, visbreaking or gasification
- Supercritical as well as subcritical solvent recovery
Design reliability with in-house test facility
With our state-of-the-art SDA PLUS pilot plant, we offer our clients a comprehensive testing program. In cooperation with the Institute of Non-Classical Chemistry (INC) at Leipzig University, the processing of all heavy refinery residues is tested using the full range of solvents (from propane to hexane), solvent mixtures, and small feed quantities (approx. one liter). Moreover, specific process applications can be designed using the new pilot plant, such as a two-stage SDA PLUS process that enables the production of resins in addition to deasphalted oil (DAO) and asphaltenes.
Together with advanced analytical methods such as SARA and EDL’s proprietary process simulation software featuring dedicated SDA PLUS calculation models, the pilot plant forms the basis for the thermodynamic and hydraulic design of the SDA PLUS extraction column and the entire process unit.
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