Hydrocracking is conventionally employed as the process to upgrade heavy crude oil for reducing its viscosity, increasing its H/C ratio, and removing associated impurities. Such process is costly and energy inefficient due to the involvements of expensive hydrogen generated from a separate unit through natural gas steam reforming and high operation pressure. The present research aims to effectively upgrade heavy crude oil including extra heavy oil and bitumen extracted from oil sands to synthetic crude oil with acceptable specifications and increased productivity at much lower pressure (&lt;5 MPa) through directly using natural gas as reducing agent. As evidenced by well-designed experiments, under the facilitation of the specially developed zeolite based catalyst, methane as the main component of natural gas is activated and thereafter crack down and saturate the long carbon chain using a synergetic effect occurring between methane and co-existing higher hydrocarbons and remove heteroatoms contained in the heavy crude oil, while itself being converted to produce extra synthetic crude oil. The engaged upgrading mechanism is also systematically investigated by employing <sup>2</sup>D and <sup>13</sup>C labelled methane and several carefully selected model compounds such as butylbenzene to represent heavy crudes through NMR, DRIFTS, and GC-MS analyses. The results clearly indicates the occurrences of initial C-C bond breakage of the charged model compound, methane activation and participation into the resulted shorter carbon chain, and following carbon chain extension for obtaining desirable product with suitable carbon chain length and saturation degree. The successful completion of this study will lead to significant cost reduction of the heavy crude oil upgrading process and make it more economically attractive. Moreover, the outcomes obtained from this work will create a novel way of methane activation and liquefaction, leading to the breakthrough in the field of catalysis and its application in clean energy conversion.

Catalytic heavy crude oil upgrading using natural gas

249th National Meeting (2015)

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