Development Of An Integrated Oil Shale Refinery With Retorting Gas Steam Reforming For Hydrogen Production

The energy structure in China is charactered by rich in coal, lack of oil and gas. Oil shale is one of the most promising alternatives, attracting increasing attenation because of its rich reserve, which makes our country carried on many research in oil shale refinery process.Oil shale is mainly used for refining for oil. The conventional oil shale refinery is a very mature technology but suffers from the following problems.(i) the remaining retorting gas is not reasonable used.(ii) The detrital oil shale is abandoned, leaving only 75% of oil shale processed.(iii) The shale oil contains a considerable amount of heteroatomic compounds, especially unsaturated hydrocarbons and sulfur, which might cause many troubles, such as instability of fuel in transportation or storage. To solve these problems, proposed in this paper is an integrated oil shale refinery with retorting gas steam reforming for hydrogen roduction. The sorption-enhanced reforming reaction is introduced to produce hydrogen. This hydrogen not only satisfies the need in the hydrogenation process but is also partially sold to improve the economic benefit. In addition, the heat needed for the Ca CO3 calcination reaction is supplied by the combustion of the detrital oil shale. This heat integration raises energy efficiency of the proposed process. Ash from the retorting unit and the reforming unit is used to make ceramsite and bricks in the building material products unit for further improving the ecomonic benefits of the whole refining process.Models and simulated processes of traditional Fushun oil shale refinery and integrated process are established. And techno-economic analysises are conducted for the traditional Fushun oil shale refinery and integrated process. The analysis results indicate that the return on investment of the proposed process is 18.89%, which is 8.46% higher than 10.53% of the traditional refinery process.