Abstract
As environmental regulations to prevent sulfur oxide emissions will become stricter in the future, it will be necessary to effectively crack residual oils of high sulfur contents by-produced in refineries.
On the other hand, it is conceivable that thesteel industry in Japan will, in the near future, suffer from shortages of coking coals for producing blast furnace cokes. Accordingly, petroleum green cokes produced by coking of petroleum residualoils are now used for producing blast furnace cokes in many steel mills. However, such conventional green cokes have neither coking properties nor fluidity. So those cokes are used merely as a carbon source of low ash content.
Therefore, it is considered very urgent and significant, from the viewpoints of petroleumrefining as well as steel manufacturing, to produce synthetic coking coals from residual oils.
For the purpose asdescribed above, authors have made studies to produce synthetic coking coals having good coking properties and fluidity from residual oils and to produce thermal-cracked oils which can be easily hydrodesulfurized.
Based on the basic studies, a research using a pilot plant is now in progress for the purpose of constructing commercial plants.
In the present paper, the results obtained pythose basic studies concerning the production of synthetic coking coals from petroleum residual oils have been reviewed.
