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What are the normal metal contents in vacuum residue and coke? How does it affect the final price of the coke?
 
Answers
19/09/2017 A: Ralph Ragsdale, Ragsdale Refining Courses, ralph.ragsdale@att.net
What is normal is almost totally dependent on the metals in the crude. Check the assay and assume all of it concentrates in the heaviest product. The answer will be only slightly high.
05/09/2017 A: Eric Vetters, ProCorr Consulting Services, ewvetters@yahoo.com
There really isn't a normal metals content of vacuum residue. It is totally dependent on the crude source and can range from a few ppm of Ni+ V to several hundred ppm. Other metals like Na & Ca are largely dependent on desalter performance and whether caustic is added or not.
Metals have little impact on fuel grade coke price. For anode grade coke, many consumers use a tiered pricing mechanism for coke purchases, and metals can make huge impact on prices - $50/ton or more.
05/09/2017 A: Morgan Rodwell, Fluor Canada Limited, morgan.rodwell@fluor.com
This depends heavily on the metals in the raw crude. Metals levels in petcoke can be into the thousands of ppmw for Vanadium and Nickel if processing a high metal crude such as Athabasca or Orinoco, whereas a low metal crude can result in petcoke with metals well below 100 ppmw.
The impact on petcoke price for metals is much more important for low sulfur petcokes that might be used for anodes or steel production, because these metals can affect the final product. In high sulfur cokes, the metals content is less significant because high sulfur petcoke is generally of low value anyway.
05/09/2017 A: Sridhar Balakrishnan, Bharat Oman Refineries Limited , laksrid@yahoo.com
Normal metal contents in vacuum residue and petcoke are nickel , vanadium , iron and sodium etc. Other metals content are also present , that depends on source. Metals like vanadium, nickel and sodium are metal impurities that catalyze oxidation and gasification reactions of carbon, which can affect the final product, hence it can be a concern for other quality parameters of petcoke .