Current Knowledge and Potential Applications of Ionic Liquids in the Petroleum Industry

Ionic Liquids: Applications and Perspectives (2011), Ch. 18, pp. 439-458

Current Knowledge and Potential Applications of Ionic Liquids in the Petroleum Industry

Murillo-Hernández José-Alberto 1 and Aburto Jorge 2

1 Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

2 Instituto Mexicano del Petróleo, Mexico

1. Introduction

The petroleum industry is faces many challenges throughout the chain value.  Heavy and extra heavy crude oils (HCOs) are more difficult to produce, transport, refine and convert to useful petrochemicals. Sometimes, conventional technologies may be applied but in most cases, new technologies are needed in order to allow economical HCOs production, transportation through pipelines, avoiding pressure drops, pipeline clogging and production stops due to asphaltene and paraffin aggregation and precipitation. Also, the higher content of heteroatoms in HCOs makes them more difficult to refine because of mainly catalyst deactivation that decreases the efficiency of processes like desulfurization, denitrogenation and demetallization. Moreover, the crude oil composition largely varies from one oil field to another among deposits along the countries. Heavy and extra-heavy oil are characterized by an API gravity between 20<API<10 and API≤10, respectively. The latter oils present a specific gravity near or above 1.0 g/cm3, i.e. they are as heavier or more than water, making crude oil dehydration, for example, very difficult to reach before refining. Therefore, the modern petroleum industry is facing several problems in petroleum production and refining.  In recent years, ionic liquids (ILs) have attracted the attention because of their properties and versatility of potential application in the petroleum industry.

ILs may be used to augment the flowability of viscous and bituminous HCOs that could augment oil production and transportation, inhibit the aggregation of asphaltenes and paraffins, and diminish the deactivation of refining catalyst by removing heteroatoms and coke from the fuel and catalyst’s surface. This work reviews the current knowledge and potential application of ILs in petroleum industry.

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In general, desulfurization, denitrogenation and dearomatization have been approached by mere extraction or extraction coupled with catalytic oxidation in ILs. Hence, sulfur removal by mere extraction with ILs displays low efficiencies . Here, the [CuxCly]- containing ILs could remove between 16-37% sulphur in gasoline and removal efficiency augments with the decreasing sulphur content. This was attributed to π-complexation of thiophene by Cu(I) as reported elsewhere

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