Desulfurization of gasoline and diesel fuels, using non-hydrogen consuming techniques

The need for cleaner fuels in term of low sulfur content is becoming a very challenging task to most of the refineries. This is due to the stringent environmental regulations which are placing considerable pressure on refinery operators to reduce sulfur below 10 PPM by the year 2010. The current conventional hydrodesulfurization process has limitation to deep desulfurize fuels as a result of the high refractory sulfur compounds.; Therefore, the need for other process to further reduce the sulfur content became very essential. This study has evaluated the oxidation extraction technique which resulted in a promising approach to reduce the sulfur content in diesel to less than 100 PPM from the original value of 1044 PPM, with total removal of 92%. This was achieved at low temperature, 50°C and atmospheric pressure. The direct extraction of diesel fuel without any oxidation was about 45% sulfur removal, however such direct extraction has a great impact on removing some of other aromatic hydrocarbons. Oxidation/extraction technique is not applicable to fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) gasoline due to the high olefins content that tend to react with hydrogen peroxide to form epoxides product. Sulfur speciation for both gasoline and diesel were accomplished in addition to the speciation of sulfones compounds that can be used as a good reference for the future studies.; The oxidation extraction technique can be used as an additional process to the hydrodesulfurization to enable the refiners to meet the future environmental sulfur regulations.