EXTRACTION AND CHARACTERIZATION (COMPOSITIONAL AND THERMAL) OF ASPHALTENES FROM BRAZILIAN VACUUM RESIDUES

Abstract

Due to the decrease in light oil reserves, the petroleum industry faces the challenge of developing technologies for processing raw materials and wastes from heavy crude oils, which contain large amounts of asphaltenes. Thus, there is an increasing need to use heavy fractions efficiently in the production of fuels and chemical raw materials. The search for means for removing asphaltenes are justified by the fact that these molecules increase the viscosity of the fractions submitted to distillation, contribute to the formation of coke, and deactivate catalysts used in refining processes. This paper presents an alternative technique for selective extraction of asphaltenes from two Brazilian vacuum residues and compares these results to the ones observed using the IP-143 standard methodology. The extracted fraction was characterized by hydrogen nuclear magnetic resonance (1H-NMR) and thermogravimetry (TG/DTG), revealing that the chemical species extracted using different techniques exhibited very small differences in composition but similar thermal behavior.