Thanks for the article.
“”Separations are a huge part of what chemical plants do,” Agrawal said. “Improving efficiency by only a few percentage points translates into major savings. For every 100 barrels of oil distilled, nearly two barrels go into supplying energy for distillation. That’s a lot of oil.”
Well,,,, perhaps they should build nuclear power plants, and they won’t have to use oil to distill oil.
No, you really do need a different form of heat energy (at different rates and temperatures from a steam boiler, and from direct heaters/burners for some other processes) in an oil refinery.
Nuke steam can be either too hot (for the low temp heating they need, or “too cold” for the higher-temp processes that use superheated steam to get the oils and tars heated up enough. Dirac burners are far, fr more efficient at heating stuff that secondary-derived energy like electric power or steam.
Best efficiency I’ve seen comes from a combined cycle plant inside an oil refinery: the dirty and bad refinery wastes were burned in a boiler to make process steam at high temperatures, the cleaner residues were burned in gas turbine to make refinery electric power, the hot gasses and air form the gas turbine went up and stack and through a heat exchanger, which make lowerer temeorature steam tat fed a second generator from the otherwise wasted fuel.
Free power is good - but you have to pay for the second generator pipie and cooling water., the extra steam genrrtor in the stck, the extra.