ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews successful strategies and process technologies that are used for reducing gasoline benzene. It includes opportunity oils and recommendations for processing them profitably and effective chloride management within catalytic reforming processing units and refinery reliability. A number of crude oils were identified as "problematic" oils based on the fact that significant amounts of organic chlorides were entrained in the oils. The organic chlorides were possibly due to oil contamination during production and transportation of the oils. Crude oil and intermediate feedstock acquisitions are a major risk-taking business for oil refiners, as they have to contend with the qualities of a wide variety of conventional and unconventional bitumen, shale oil, and synthetic crude oils. As shale oil was introduced at a relatively high percentage in that refinery's crude slate, naphtha from the crude unit was fed directly to a fixed-bed catalytic reformer.
