Crude upgrading and plastics recycling: A technical discussion with Aduro Clean Technologies

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I want to welcome you all to this latest episode of Hydrocarbon Processing's podcast series, the main column. I am your host, Lee Nichols, and we have a very special guest joining us today, Eric Appelman, who is the Chief Revenue Officer for Aduro Clean Technologies. We've got a lot to get to on today's episode, so I want to welcome him in. Eric, how are you doing today?

I am lovely. I wish you all well from the eastern side of the Atlantic Ocean. I'm at home in the Netherlands, but we easily bridge the time gap here. So I'm really excited to be your guest today, Lee.

Excellent. And we always enjoy talking with you. You've become almost kind of a regular on the show. Too bad.

But it's great. What y'all have is a really interesting technology. But before I dive into that and the questions I have on that, for those listeners that we have around the world who may not be familiar with your company, Aduro Clean Technologies. Can you just provide just a brief summary about your organization?

Yeah, absolutely. Aduro Clean Technologies, Canadian startup company that is now in its scale-up stage. We've been around since 2011. And the real claim to fame is that we have found a unique way to break up big hydrocarbon structures.

And you can apply that to very heavy oils and bitumen. and that's also where the company started out with many years ago. We've recently put more emphasis on breaking those other big pieces of hydrocarbon that we want to get rid of, which is waste plastics. All patented stuff, all quite unique, a lot of interesting advantages that you probably can find back in the earlier podcast that are on Archive from My Sand.

We are now very excitingly with that waste plastic track into scaling with building our first plant in the Netherlands. And then we have also found some really good ways to use this into the more traditional petrochemical field. And what we really like about you is you're a great dynamic speaker. And you will actually be presenting at Hydrocarbon Processing's International Refining and Petrochemical Conference this year, which for everyone who's not familiar with that, it's a big technical conference that we host.

It's going to be in Houston, Texas, October 8th and 9th. So definitely you can see Eric present there as well as a whole bunch of good technical case studies. But for you, Eric, could you give us just a sneak peek of what you're going to be presenting at the event? Yeah, I will actually be talking about breaking down hydrocarbons, as this may become as no surprise.

but at this time we will show how that is applied to a particular category of crude oils that are difficult to handle and more specific highly waxy paraffinic crudes and I think for those skilled in the chemical arts it will come as no surprise that they behave pretty similar to poly elephants they're basically small poly elephants and there are some very exciting ways how we can create value for the producers of this material because we are actually able to break it down to smaller than wax but we also able to break it down to some very interesting distillate like products in one go while we at it And so that is what I hope to talk with you guys about Perfect And yeah we really excited to see that presentation And so kind of diving into our conversation today, I want to talk a little bit about your organization's technology.

So what sets it apart when it comes to upgrading bitumen and heavy crude? Well, the most pursued route is brute thermal force. Just crank up the heat. And I like to talk a little bit more from the experience for waste plastics, but I think that is not that dissimilar from coking technologies.

You crank up the heat, you break pieces off the main structure or you break the whole structure up in one go, and then you vaporize them, recover them, and you get something that is light and pleasant. And depending on what you start out with, you also get out with something that is too heavy and you do something else with that. What we do is we still apply heat, but by combining that with some very cheap and simple catalysis, we can keep the temperature down. And those slightly milder conditions are immediately going to pay back to you because you are going to make less gases.

You can have less coking and that is all helping you. But what is really interesting as well is that we have also found a pathway to stabilize any radicals that are formed in the process. So some people may have heat treated heavy bitumen like you have in Alberta. And the point is that if you just turn off the heat and come back the next day, it has re-solidified.

and by doing something with your radical type i presume it is radical type intermediates you prevent them from recombining again and do things that you do not want to do and you might call it a hydrogen donor mechanism although our chief scientists are going to punish me if i say it that way but what you could pretty well say is that we have found a way to mobilize an active form of hydrogen to in-situ stabilize the product. And then it gives you a bit of an idea. When I met the guys for the first time, that's about four years ago, they described the mechanism and I said, well, actually what you seem to be doing is hydrocracking without hydrogen.

And I think that's describing it quite well. So on one hand, you see that we do not make those undesired side streams that you do not like, like fuel gas and coke and that sort of thing. But we also stabilize the actual product. And on top of that, but that is a little bit more for the plastics domain, we have some unique selectivity which allows us to push the product into a desirable molecular weight category.

So really too much to talk about on a podcast almost, but there's a lot of documentation out there. Well, yeah, and one thing that you kind of dove into a little bit about it is the benefits of this technology. So what ways does this technology create value for those heavy crude producers? Well, if you talk about the specific combination of these waxy crudes, these paraffinic crudes, which among others, you have that in Utah, but there are also other pockets of that.

It's just like with those polyolefins. We break down the chains. That is already helpful because it will not wax out so easily at all or not at all. And it also will become easier to transport, easier to store, easier to maneuver around.

So that is a very important thing It is actually easier than with polyethylene It is easier than with polyolephans because a polyethylene molecule might be a C200 or something like that and these crudes are considerably smaller, so it is a lighter form of processing. And, of course, you do break them down, and then what you get is, well, let's say relatively light linear molecules, which are a particularly good fit with certain product categories like a steam crackable nafta or with a diesel-like product.

Not that we are making the real thing in one go. There's still a lot of formulation and upgrading required. But we bring you quite a long way towards a feasible product. And that is the whole idea of it.

So easier to maneuver, easier to manipulate, easier to store, easier to transport, but also already sort of halfway towards a useful and valuable mixture of molecules. Yeah, those are some really good benefits, it sounds like. Yeah, yeah. So this focus then on heavy crude upgrading, is it a core area of development for Aduro, or is it more of a parallel initiative?

Well, it is, as I said, it is where the company started out with. And, well, as a startup company, you're also a bit flexible. But it is really the same thing. Because what we're looking at is linear hydrocarbons and create those to something that is meaningful.

So with polyethylene, you may often try to turn it into a sort of a lafta, something that is recrackable, but you could easily stop at diesel stage as well. And a waxy crude is not dissimilar to that. It's pretty much the same thing. So I see it as two legs under the company, but very much one technology platform that you can commercialize in different ways.

And one other area that I want to dive into is something that we've seen a whole lot of press releases, news releases, technology releases on over the past year or two. And that's on plastics recycling and how big of a challenge and trend that is around the world. So can you just share a quick update on the progress, including any recent partnerships and pilot projects that you'll have going on? Yeah, we are a relatively late entrant into this game because we started out with working on heavy oils.

But we are really going forward very, very fast. So we have announced that in the beginning of the end of last year, we got our fully continuous pilot plant running in London, Ontario. extremely important to look at many different incarnations of waste you're going to be surprised how many variations there are on that but also to study the stability of the process to look at the side streams that you are making all that sort of thing but because also our process design is is actually made up of unit operations that are extremely well understood and of which the scaling rules are also very well understood we we took the courageous step to to also already start the preparations for building our first plant because there are not going to be that many surprises while scaling up and we decided to to build that first plant in the netherlands that is for a variety of reasons it has to do with the fact that in in europe the collection and sorting of waste is fairly well developed and it is relatively easy to get a good raw material You do not want to be also a sorter of waste it already difficult enough to to operate a novel chemical process so that that corner is covered another advantage although it is not super decisive is that europe is the place where you do have liquid crackers you north america is obviously a etane cracking territory for very obvious reasons um but northwest europe especially is pretty good at hydrocarbon crackers for liquids.

And whereas there are some competitiveness issues, which are mainly related to having very old assets and maybe subcritical in size, there are still a very good number of assets that have a good future. And then, of course, there is the whole regulatory thing, because if you are looking at the petrochemical scene, this is an incredible industry. I grew up in it and I still admire how that industry has managed over the past 100 years to become extremely efficient with heat, with material, with everything.

And of course, with waste, yeah, you're introducing new grades of complications. So you're never going to be at the same level at day one. Now, what is important is that some market is created, that market is being created in Europe with regulations that stipulate minimum recycled content in new plastic products. And that is going to help.

And those three factors combined make that we felt that Europe would be a good place to put this thing in. But of course, it will not remain like that because everybody in the world would not really like to be looking at a heap of plastic waste in front of his house. so I think one of our key drivers is to basically get rid of that bloody waste so that is what we do we are scaling very rapidly pilot plant we have the first plant in progress and meanwhile we are learning and we have also what is the right word here not reactivated because we have been activated all the time but we have now also made a big step forward on the heavy, waxy, crude side of the business.

Excellent. And one thing you mentioned earlier in the conversation is, I mean, we could probably talk a good hour or two about this technology and the technologies that y'all have. But people that are listening around the world, if they want to find out more information about your technologies and solutions, where's the best place they can go after listening to this conversation? I think I would recommend that you start on our website.

There are a lot of presentations on there because in the end of the day, we basically take one technology concept forward. And it is explained well, I believe. It might actually also be on your own website, on IRPC. I've been speaking there now.

This year is going to be the third time, I believe. But the presentations of last year also explain the concept behind it all. And I think if you can have a little bit of chemical fantasy, you could easily see how it could be equally deployed in adjacent territories, both on waste plastics and crude oil. Well, excellent.

Well, again, Eric, really want to thank you for your time today to talk about these technologies. Really incredible stuff. And of course, we're really looking forward to seeing you in Houston in October at IRPC. Yeah, and if you want to end with a call to action, just come to see us there.

Let's meet, and then we can talk, and I'll disclose all the secrets that I can't disclose. There you go. Well, again, Eric, really appreciate your time today. And of course, as always, we want to thank all of you for listening to this latest installment.

Thank you so much.