Whitepaper on Crude Blending Reasons for Blending Crude Oils at a Refinery

Reasons for Blending Crude Oils at a Refinery Oil refineries, and especially their on-process units that process the primary crude feed stocks, are not uniform in either design or operation. The refinery process units and the combination of units built and in service at a given refinery location are part of a plan to accommodate a certain slate of crudes based on their properties. These decisions are also balanced against the availability and cost of crudes to determine an operating profit point. The more consistent the supply of crude oil to a specific refinery, the more that refinery can tailor its operation to that specific crude supply. However, economics makes that level of optimization difficult to achieve or sustain. Necessity forces refiners to have to retain some flexibility in the refinery process to handle a wider range of crude types than that preferred. Crude blending works hand in hand with refinery process flexibility in crude types by enabling the ability to mix crudes that may not, as individual feeds, satisfy the operating range of the refinery, but as components of a mixed feed will meet the refinery operating requirements.