Condensate yield in barrels per million cubic feet is the vertical axis and condensate production is the horizontal axis. Condensate yield is down 29% from its peak. Either drier fields are being brought online or there is retrograde condensation of liquids in the reservoir as the pressure drops. It is more likely the latter. Condensate production is down 20% from its peak. The peak is in for District 8.

Gas production peaked a year ago.

My apologies for the long interlude since my last posting but I have been rather busy with the collapsing petrochemical industry in Europe, most of which is due to the high cost of feedstocks and very unfavourable governments who are placing huge burdens on businesses, such as ESG, DIE, and CSDDD legislation.

The topic of this discussion is hydroprocessing which is a generic term that covers quite a broad range of processes in the refining and petrochemical industries. My focus will be on refining and hydroprocessing that covers two main processes:

Hydrotreating - used widely for upgrading both feedstocks and finished products

Hydrocracking - used for upgrading low quality feedstocks and products, generally heavy gas oils.

After being bombarded with Barnett shale hype in the Permian Basin for the past 5 years including trillions more MCFs from pundits, analysts', cheerleaders and another United States Geological Society assessment, here...

www.usgs.gov

RESTON, Va. — The U.S. Geological Survey released its assessment of undiscovered gas and oil in the Woodford and Barnett shales in the Permian Basin, assessing that there are technically recoverable resources of 28.3 trillion cubic feet of gas – enough to supply the United States for 10 months at the current rate of consumption -- and 1.6 billion barrels of oil, or 10 weeks’ supply for the nation.

...let's take a look at how this play is working out so far.

The Barnett Shale is Mississippian Age, not Permian and its top lies at close to 11,000 feet below the surface, deeper than typical HZ targets in the Permian like the Wolfamp. Its dispositional environment is totally different and tends to be dense mudstone (shale) without the usual high carbonate content. It can be over pressured and difficult to drill because of different pressure gradients going to TD. There have been several losses of surface control events drilling Barnett wells in the Midland Basin.

Its goodies typically lie in thicker sections of the Barnett correlative interval and those areas of thick gross shale may even be…

This is a belated follow up to my last posting on Fluid Catalytic Cracking (FCC). My health is still a limitation and I have also have to work. In this post I will explain more on the innovations both in equipment design and catalyst technology.

Over the past 40 years FCC designs have proliferated with new innovations to increase flexibility of operation and widen the product scope.

FCC’s are primarily a gasoline machine that also produces some olefinic LPG and a rather poor quality diesel fraction. There is now significant progress being made with new FCC designs that increase feedstocks for petrochemical production, boost gasoline octane, and process poorer quality feedstocks, including atmospheric residue. New catalysts have been developed that can work in conjunction with new hardware designs, that dramatically widen the operating envelope. 

Huge leaps in catalyst technology have been made that can extend the life of the catalyst, tolerate…

My apologies of the rather long interlude from my last posting. I am not getting any younger and some health issues have had to take precedence. The good news is that I now appear to have reached a stable plateau for the time being (until next time).

In this briefing I will go into detail on Fluid Catalytic cracking which is one of 3 main technologies for upgrading heavy distillates.

As usual I have attached the full presentation to the post- see bottom.

Exxon developed the first FCC (model 1) at Baton Rouge LA in 1942.  Since then FCC technology has evolved via many iterations. Primarily a process for gasoline production, it extended the amount of gasoline that could produced from a barrel of oil. Notwithstanding the FCC gasoline has very desirable octane values which reduced the overall demand for octane boosting additives.

FCC’s also produce significant amounts of olefinic…

My original intention was for the next discussion to be on cracking processes, but in retrospect it would be better to discuss what is required to crack hydrocarbons to produce usable transport fuels.

In the early days of refining the refineries we geared up to produce naphtha, kerosine, diesel and atmospheric residue. The atmospheric residue was frequently used as fuel oil for power generation, steam production and marine applications ( steam turbine and marine diesels).  This type of processing was known as hydroskimming. In the developed world very few hydroskimming  refineries now exist as these refineries cannot extract the value in the atmospheric residue or residual fuels. In the 1960 many refineries were fitted out with vacuum distillation units and fluid catalytic cracking units (FCC). Sometimes a thermal cracker or vis-breaker were also employed. In the 1970’s hydrocracking and coking became available as the demand for ever more gasoline and…

El Segundo Refinery Fire

There has been muted press output on the El Segundo refinery fire the same news line being copied to many reports.

My apologies for the slow follow up but I am afraid work must come first. My attention has been on how the EU chemical industry is going survive with the net zero demands of the politicians. Simple answer it will be nearly wiped out .

Today I want to discuss gasoline production which to many is a hot topic for those not buying into EV’s. All the briefings in the index can be discussed but I think that gasoline blending is probably the best follow on from basic refining.

I am a bit late posting my first real topic on why US refiners cannot use all the USL TO. Last night my first attempt disappeared when I pressed the publish button and I lost all my work. I have also had to sanitize the images to take out the logos

To set the stage one first has to understand a how a refinery works and what it produces. To keep things simple I am going to use a simple refinery that produces transport fuels and some co products. I have colour coded the main processes in the refinery under 4 headings which are: