I took a few days last month with some friends to railfan the Columbia Gorge and a bit of the Blues. This was one my favorite, a unit coke train with cars less than a year old.
I’m curious as to the final destination of this coke. The train was routed to Roberts Banks in BC, so I assume it was going somewhere by ship. It was also the only shipment I’m aware of. Were there more? If not, is the coke shipped on the same vessel as coal?
Steve Carter
If it’s coke, then it’s petroleum coke, most likely from one of the refineries in Laurel or Billings, Montana. The destination would likely be China (but possibly South Korea, Japan, or Taiwan). It’s not shipped on the same vessel as coal unless loaded into a different hold, but most likely it is being loaded entirely on a separate ship. Pet coke is used as industrial fuel, but not in a blast furnace like coke made from coal, because it’s too soft. Sometimes pet coke is blown into blast furnaces in the same manner as powdered coal, as a substitute for natural gas or coke-oven gas.
RWM
Petroleum coke? I’ve never heard of that before. Is it a biproduct of the refining process, or a purpose made product?
Steve,
Thanks for the photo. I’m always amazed by the quality of the photos one can find on these forums, as well as the talents displayed by so many. But one of the things I enjoy most is being given the opportunity to see beautiful landscapes which I will probably never get to see in person.
Tom
Residue from refining heavy grades of Crude Oil. Usually has a lot of sulphur but also fairly good BTU rating.
Murphy: Crude oil is a mixture of hydrocarbon molecules. Light crude is dominated by smaller molecules; heavy crude by large molecules, sweet crude has low sulfur content, and sour crude has high sulfur content. Sulfur is highly undesireable in crude oil, natural gas, or petroluem products because it is highly reactive with most other elements to form toxic, corrosive, or environmentally destructive compounds such as H2S (one of the most deadly poisons there is) and H2SO4 (sulfuric acid). Sour gas and oil are desulfured as close as economical to the wellhead because the sulfur destroys steel pipelines very quickly. Not all the sulfur is removed, but enough of it so that the gas or oil can be pipelined long distances in ordinary carbon-steel pipelines without creating too high of a corrosion rate. At the refinery, more sulfur is removed in order to avoid destroying the refinery, or the gasoline or diesel engines, tanks, and pipelines the refined product will be transported in and used to fuel, and now the EPA has mandated ULSD (ultra-low sulfur diesel) to reduce destruction by acid rain to buildings, forests, water bodies, etc.
In the best of all worlds, a refinery wants to take in light, sweet crude because it doesn’t have to spend money to remove the sulfur and can run a simple distillation circuit to separate the crude into marketable fractions such as gasoline, diesel fuel, and petrochemical feedstocks. Heavy crude might only have 10-20% motor fuels fractions and the remainder of the crude is large molecules, which, in order to be turned into motor fuels, have to be cracked and hydrogenated, which is very energy-intensive and requires a lot of complex refinery processes, all of which is expensive. There’s only so much of the heavy crude input to a refinery that is economical to crack. The remainder generally goes down one of two paths, either to asphalt or to pet coke, depending upon the precise nature of the molecules and the market for t
That’s all quite interesting, but it caused a lightbulb to go off in my head. A lot of my builder/developer customers say they are having terrible issues with the price of asphalt for parking lots and streets. The asphalt suppliers say it’s due to a shortage of raw asphalt materials. [}:)]
Shortage! [(-D] There’s no such thing as a “shortage” of anything but the desire or ability to pay for something. There might be a shortage of cheap asphalt but I guarantee that if they wanted to pay $1000/ton there would be trucks in their driveway within 24 hours.
RWM
Some petroleum coke, I am guess a small percent, is calcined.
Flint Hills Resources refinery at Roseport, MN (formerly known as Koch Refining) produces a lot of Pet Coke from the Canadian Crude they refine. CP hauls trainloads of the stuff to either the powerplant at Fayette, IN (near Terre Haute) or the powerplant at Rincon, GA (near Macon).
Is it a good guess, that the petroleum ingredient used in asphalt is the same one used in shingles, and that’s one of the reasons that asphalt shingles have doubled in price since Christmas?
There may be some differences between asphalt used for roads and asphalt used for shingles (making a WAG here), but prices of both would move with the price of crude oil (which was down to $77/bbl on Friday).
Another way to put, I don’t see how the asphalt in shingles could be anything other than a petroleum derivative (ain’t enough coal tar to go around).