In Situ Hydrogen Generation

In situ upgrading of bitumen and heavy oils and converting them into low sulfur, low N2, and low asphaltene can help with both producing cleaner fuel as well as utilizing vast resources of energy that could otherwise be wasted due to extreme measures of no fossil fuel policies.  Additionally, such processes could produce valuable products, enhanced shipping/pipelining, and less demanding downstream processing.  Generating hydrogen could be another focus area for in situ upgrading.  The latter, traditionally, has been associated with adding hydrogen donors or hydrogen gas as a means of promoting upgrading reactions and stabilizing upgraded products.  With the recent interest in replacing fossil fuels with cleaner gases such as hydrogen, it is important to find ways of repurposing the thermal recovery processes into means of enhancing Hydrogen production. 

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With our expertise in thermal oil recovery, we can help you with ways of utilizing catalysts in reactions such as: hydroprocessing (HP), hydrotreating reactions, such as hydrocracking (HC), hydrodesulfurization (HDS), hydrodenitrogenation (HDN) and hydrodeoxygenation (HDO) for oil upgrading as well as Hydrogen production.  More details are discussed in our recent publication (Fassihi et al., 2023). The main objective is to lower the carbon footprint in heavy oil and tar sands production.