VCC technology makes it possible to obtain oil products of the highest quality from heavy oil distillation residues

Truly high convertion of crude oil is the maximum extraction of high-quality oil products from raw materials, even not of the best quality. And it is possible, which is proved by the team of the Heavy Residue Convertion Complex of TAIF-NK JSC. How such products differ from those obtained using technologies that have already become classics of processing, and what else are they preparing to offer the Russian and global industries in Nizhnekamsk — read in the material of Realnoe Vremya.

There will be more and more such units in the world

On November 3, 2021, permission was received to put into operation a production that could safely be called unique for the oil refining industry of the world. VCC or Veba Combi Cracking is a technology known since the beginning of the last century. In 1913, German scientist Friedrich Bergius proposed the technology of catalytic hydrogenation of coal when exposed to hydrogen under high pressure and at high temperature. In the 1940s, attempts were made in Germany to introduce it. After the Second World War, against the background of the presence of light oil on the markets and low oil prices, the patent was forgotten on the shelf for many years. Only at the border of the 20th and the 21st centuries they decided on resuscitating it. In China, two units were built in a classic solution for the technology, with an emphasis on coal as a raw material, and in Tatarstan they followed the path of implementing a larger project, where heavy oil distillation residues — tar are used as raw materials.

 “The main difference between VCC and standard cracking is the presence of separate reactor units operating with a suspended layer of coal additive: this helps to remove heavy metals, which are catalytic poisons, from the tar. The additive adsorbs all metals and those substances that can spoil the final product," the director of the HRCC, Andrey Konovnin, told the journalist of Realnoe Vremya.

Today we can confidently say that the technology implemented by TAIF-N