Characterization and reactivity of heteroatomic compounds contained in vacuum gas oil
Converting heavy petroleum cuts into valuable fuels becomes a strong necessity for the refining industry as crude oil quality globally decreases. Among all the conversion processes, vacuum gas oil (VGO) hydrocracking is certainly the most suitable process to convert VGOs into high quality diesel fuel.In order to improve the understanding of this catalytic process, a detailed characterization of VGO feeds and products is needed. As existing analytical methods are not currently powerful enough, this work focused on the use of high-temperature comprehensive bidimensional gas chromatography (HT-GC×GC) and Fourier-transform high resolution mass spectrometry (FT-ICR/MS). First, it was shown that HT-GC×GC can elute heavy boiling point compounds up to nC68 (641 °C). Moreover, a HT-GC×GC-SCD method was developed to characterize sulfurcontaining compounds according to their chemical family. The obtained results were in accordance with parallel FT-ICR/MS measurements for sulfur compounds. For nitrogen-containing compounds, separation limits of HTGC×GC-NCD were reached despite the use of an additional online pre-separation by supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC). Therefore, a FT-MS based methodology was proposed to quantify nitrogen-containing chemical families and study basic and neutral compounds with ESI(+) and ESI(-) respectively.Hence, this work proposed innovative analytical tools for the characterization of vacuum gas oils. It also confirmed that highly-alkylated dibenzothiophenes and carbazoles were the most refractory sulfur and nitrogen-containing compounds towards hydrotreatment.