ABSTRACT
The best way to understand refinery operations is to review flow diagrams and the products produced. Refinery configurations change over time and differences from previous configurations provide an indicator of the investments that were made. The Delaware City refinery is one of two coking facilities on the East Coast with access to waterborne cargos and a distribution network of pipelines, marine vessels, truck, and rail. The Tulsa refinery primarily serves the mid-continent region, and distillates and gasolines are delivered to market via pipelines owned and operated by Magellan. Refiners that use flasher tops as lube base stocks extract the asphaltenes and resins using propane extraction or the residual oil supercritical extraction process. The Gelsenkirchen refinery near Dusseldorf, Germany, connects two sites at Scholven and Horst linked by a pipeline system. The refinery is integrated with petrochemical operations that are co-located with the refinery and include two steam crackers, aromatics recovery, cumene, cyclohexane, dealkylation, partial oxidation, methanol, and ammonia synthesis.
