Eni Slurry Technology: A new process for heavy oil upgrading

EST (Eni Slurry Technology) represents a significant technological innovation in residue conversion and unconventional oil upgrading and will mark a step change in the treatment of the heavy end of the barrel. This new technology, internally developed by Eni, allows the total conversion of the heaviest fraction of the barrel into useful products, mainly transportation fuels, with a great major impact on the economic and environmental valorisation of hydrocarbon resources. EST employs nano-sized hydrogenation catalysts and an original process scheme which allow complete feedstock conversion to valuable distillates or its upgrading to synthetic crude oil with a substantial API gravity gain, avoiding the production of residual by-products, such as pet-coke or heavy fuel oil. Since the 1990's, the technology has been successfully tested on both laboratory and pilot scales. Following the positive results obtained at this scale, Eni decided to build a 1200 bpd Commercial Demonstration Plant (CDP) within its Taranto refinery. The plant was completed and successfully started up in the third quarter of 2005. Since then, the CDP unit operation has allowed the successful test of EST performance on heavy feedstocks from around the world (Russia, Venezuela, Mexico, Middle East and Canada), confirming the great flexibility of the process. The peculiar characteristics of EST in terms of yield, products quality, absence of undesired by-products and feedstock flexibility constitute its superior economic and environmental attractiveness. EST can offer additional margins in the range of 3-5 $/bbl of feedstock over current conversion technologies, which can be crucial for the exploitation of unconventional oil reserves.