By John Lee.
Bayshore Petroleum Corp is pleased to announce that it has entered into a Letter of Intent with International Enhanced Petroleum Services (EPS), a private UAE company with its registered office located in the Jebel Ali Free Zone, UAE and operating in Iraq, to construct a pilot heavy oil upgrading facility utilizing a proprietary cold catalytic cracking (CCC) process.
The pilot plant, to be located in Iraq, will initially process 1,000 barrels of bitumen per day using refinery Residual Bottom Bitumen (RBB) as feed and will upgrade that feed into diesel-quality product oil, synthetic gas and coke.
The project upgrading capacity is intended to be installed in one of Iraq's refineries. Currently, the RBB are mixed with Iraq's light premium crude and exported. An upgrader of RBB will significantly enhance Iraq's refinery capability by converting their low value waste RBB into high value diesel oil and will also help its refineries to handle ever increasing heavy / light crude mix feedstock.
Bayshore and EPS will procure RBB supply directly from the refinery and the 1,000 barrels per day pilot plant is intended to demonstrate the commercial viability of bitumen upgrading into diesel light oil in Iraq and Middle East area.
Current Iraqi refining capacity is 640,000 Bopd and there are plans to increase this capacity to 960,000 Bopd in the next few years to meet domestic product demand. A large capacity upgrader in the future will also provide further heavy crude and fuel oil refining capacity to Iraq and open up potential heavy oil exploration/development in the country.
(Source: Bayshore)
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