What is cutter stock oil

Desipite all the talk these days about investment requirements needed to meet IMO Regulatory changes, let's ensure that we're minimizing the inefficiencies in our current business. Many refiners make the m istake of ignoring fuel oil optimization since the specs are not complicated.

Refiners would rather focus on gasoline or diesel blend optimization. When it comes to optimizing refinery bunker blending, there is one spec to focus on - viscosity. There are other specs such as flash, API, sulfur and metals, but the big. Maximizing gasoil recovery from resid makes a lot of sense since refiners can crack gasoils into gasoline and distillates. Gasoil is also a very poor cutting agent, so higher fuel oil production results from leaving gasoil in resid.

However, a subtle variable not often accounted for is the quality of fuel oil cutter. Like any other blend parameter, bunker oil cutter optimization requires deep technical scrutiny to capture maximum benefits. But compare the cutter efficiency of diesel to cycle oil, and even between two different types of cycle oil. On 10 KBD resid production, this is barrels per day more distillate downgraded to bunker oil! The lost opportunity cost for blending with a less efficient cutter stock is shown below in terms of how much money is lost annually.

For a refinery that produces as much as 10 KBD resid, the opportunity cost for fuel oil blend optimization is just tremendous! Downstream capabilities View our downstream services. Insights Read our latest insight articles.

Refinery Reference Desk Return to the homepage. Energy Insights website Learn more about Energy Insights. Cutter stocks are oil and oil-related by products used to thin oil.

They are typically used to reduce viscosity to produce on-spec European fuel oils. But they can also be blended to reduce sulphur content and produce low sulphur fuel oils. We collect our cutter stocks from Northwest Europe: clean bulk cutter stocks for blending by barges and other cutter products from the petrochemical and chemical industry arriving by truck.

For reception and storage, we use our tank terminal in the Rotterdam and Antwerp area.