09-09-2014, 02:25 PM
Increased demand of oil supply, need for energy security, environmental concerns, depleting petroleum reserves coupled with deteriorating quality of the crude oil has led to the concept of using renewable energy resources such as vegetable oils. The work in this report is based on the experimental study on co processing of vegetable oil in diesel hydrotreating pilot plant. Transesterification is one commercial method but comes with high investment costs and other complications to produce typical type of fuel whereas hydro treatment process is alternate to replace transesterification. The main advantage of vegetable oil hydrotreating is that no special infrastructure is required and the product (diesel) is compatible with the existing engines. Study of befouls and hydro conversion of non edible vegetable oils were also carried out along with the operation, maintenance and engineering of a typical tubular fixed bed hydroprocessing unit.