Preparation Of Zeolite Based Micro-mesoporous Composite Catalyst And Its Application For Oilsands Bitumen Upgrading

Recently, as the sustaining development of the human society and economy, the petroleum consumption of the world, especially of some emerging economies such as china, increases rapidly. However, the depletion of traditional fossil energy is extremely urgent. Thus, as one of the most abundant unconventional fossil resource, oilsands has received increasing attention from big companies and relative scientific research institutions.As we know, oilsands bitumen has the characteristics of high viscosity, high density and high sulfur, nitrogen and heavy metals content, which means traditional commercial zeolite catalysts could not be applied appropriately to the primary upgrading process (catalytic visbreaking) of the oilsands bitumen. However, mesoporous materials, because of their remarkable characteristics, such as high specific surface area, large pore size and the ordered pore size distribution, offer a new solution to this challenge.The main intent of this paper is to synthesize a new type of micro-mesoporous clin/MCM-41 catalyst, using the clinoptilolite as the source of aluminum, combining the advantages of the mesoporous material and microporous zeolite, so that it can be suitable to the catalytic visbreaking of oil bitumen.This thesis firstly introduced the current circumstance of the oilsands industry, including the upgrading process and the application natural zeolites catalysts. Then, the paper briefly illuminated the characters, synthetic methods and researching progress of the mesoporous materials. At last, the author explained why choose the synthetic strategy of using natural clinoptilolite as the source, and simply discussed the feasibility of the synthesis method.In the experimental part, single factor method was conducted to find out how the different conditions, temperature, pH value, reaction time etc. influence the quality of the samples. Then, using of the characterization techniques like BET, XRD, SEM, TEM made it possible to notice the difference between the samples. At last, the optimized conditions of catalysts’synthesis was obtained. which is: reaction temperature 30℃; adding 1g clinoptilolite as source, pH=10, crystallization temperature 120℃, and crystallization time 48h.. The prepared clin/MCM-41 catalysts showed high exterior surface area and highly ordered arrangement of the mesoporous pores, and the synthesis method was low costed and reliableThen, this clin/MCM-41 was tested in the catalytic visbreaking process of Canadian SAGD oilsands bitumen. The result is very promising. Under the condition of water’s existence,310℃,30min, the viscosity of the product dropped 81%. It revealed a 30% improvement over the traditional modified zeolite. The results also revealed that the saturate content and the diesel composition of the products, is relatively higher than the products catalyzed by traditional zeolite. Meanwhile, to more deeply understand the hydrothermal catalytic mechanism of the reaction, n-dodecane was chosen to be the cracking model compound. Using the clin/MCM-41 catalyst, the reactions was conducted in the reaction temperature range of 305～350℃, then the results were preliminarily discussed.Finally, the energy requirement of the process was primarily estimated. The result shows that compared with the current industrial process (surface mining+ solvent+extraction+upgrading), the energy consumption of the new method is over 30% lower.