Development of an Integrated Oil Shale Refinery Process with Coal Gasification for Hydrogen Production

Exploration and exploitation of oil shale are of increasing interest to the countries with scarce oil reserves. Retorting technology is applied to produce shale oil. However, most of retorting processes waste detrital oil shale and the remaining gas, leading to low economic benefit. An integrated oil shale refinery process with coal gasification in supercritical water is proposed for better economic performance than the conventional retorting processes. In the proposed process, coal in shale mines is gasified in supercritical water to produce hydrogen. The hydrogen is used in the hydrogenation process to upgrade shale oil to diesel, naphtha, liquefied petroleum gas, etc. The detrital oil shale and remaining gas are burned to heat the gasification process. The proposed process is modeled and simulated for techno-economic analysis. The economic performance of the proposed process is compared with that of the conventional retorting process. Results show that the return on investment of the proposed process is 22.72%, much higher than the conventional one, 14.45%.