An Investigation for Utilisation of Ionic liquids in the Removal of Transition Metals from Refinery Feedstocks

Fossil fuels predominantly contain impurities that possess different molecular structures. Metal impurities of crude oils which frequently occur as metalloporphyrin complexes are of the principal target of refineries, and if not treated, these undesired constituents cost refineries considerably due to their adverse effects on the catalyst activity of hydroprocessing units and equipment corrosion problems. On the other hand, the ongoing current and future demand for vanadium in the steel industry, catalysis and flow batteries has led the researchers to be encouraged to conduct extensive researches over vanadium recovery from a variety of refineries hydrocarbon streams and the industrial wastes. Only for vanadium redox batteries, the cumulative demand for vanadium from now to 2030 is projected to be up to 370 kton, meaning there is a huge opportunity for vanadium recovery from alternative sources. Apart from crude oil and diluted bitumen from oil sands which contain a high amount of transition metals and so are the attractive target for demetallation, there are a variety of so-called wastes - such as petroleum coke fly ash, 100 Mt/year- containing relatively large amounts of vanadium and nickel which could be attractive unintentional targets. The advantage and drawbacks of different feedstocks will be explained in this report. The current and future challenges have been investigated, and attempts were made to propose solutions to those challenges.
This project is aiming to investigate the utilisation of ionic liquids to eliminate specifically vanadium and nickel via physical contact and bi-phasic separation and to investigate the recovery of both the ionic liquid and the precious metals using conventional techniques. In this report you will also read the source of metals in refineries, investigation of current demetallation techniques, mechanisms by which metals are associated in asphaltene, reported utilisation of ionic liquids for oil demetallation, electrochemical characterisation of metalloporphyrins in ionic liquids and the future market of vanadium.