ASSESSMENT OF POSSIBILITY OF OBTAINING ALLOYING COMPONENTS IN THE PROCESS OF DESALTING OF HEAVY HYDROCARBON RAW MATERIALS. Part 1

In the current situation of the mineral resources wit h a general depletion of ferrous and non-ferrous ores, it becomes necessary to search for new and alternative resources for obtaining metals and their compounds from available resources. Taking into account that ferrous and non-ferrous ores are practically lacking in some foreign countries, especially in Central Asia6 this problem becomes more actual. Thus, a high share of exports of ferrous and non-ferrous metals products remains due to lack of self resources. which increases the additional load on the countries, especially that suffer from wars like Syria. There is a wide range of hydrocarbon metal-containing raw materials (metal-bearing oils, oil sands, coal ash, shale, etc.) in Syrian resources. which may become an alternative source for production of ferrous and non-ferrous metals and their alloys; they also have a strategic interest for the Russian and foreign metallurgical industry. The concentration of impurities of ferrous and non-ferrous metals (such as Fe. Mn, Cr, V and Ni) in heavy crude oil is quite high, what in its turn leads to negative effects on operation of some equipment components, resulting in the need for emergency stops and downtimes of equipment and consequent repairs and technical maintenance. Development of alternative technologies for extraction of these metals at the desalination's process of metal-bearing heavy crude oils can be characterized by interdisciplinary character, which simultaneously solves the problem of extracting ferrous and non-ferrous metal components in order to improve the properties of heavy oil as well as the oil products quality. Extraction of ferrous and heavy non-ferrous metals (iron, manganese. chromium, vanadium and nickel, copper) from the heavy metal-bearing Syrian crude oils makes a great interest, due to deteriorating economic situation in this country and lack of mineral ores. This study describes the hydrometallurgical technology based on combination of extraction-sorption processes for ferrous and non-ferrous metal extraction from heavy crude oil. The extraction is based on processing the emulsion of crude oil with aqueous solution of naphthenic acid, followed by centrifugal separation; them hydrocarbon metal-containing concentrate (acidified by HCl) is subjected to sorption process using a mixture of two Syrian natural sorbents, The following desorption process allows to recover vanadium and nickel from sorbent and to regenerate the sorbents with desorption efficiency 89.6 and 95.8% consecutively.