Tar sands vanadium pentoxide furnace problem
Appears at 2 points in 2 lectures.
Appearances across the corpus
Brief consulting engagement Tom worked on. Used to illustrate the practical legacy of the Wulff-vanadium discovery: API specifications now mandate vanadium removal from crude, and the furnaces that do that removal can only be built from two materials (a brittle ceramic, and an expensive vanadium-titanium or aluminum-titanium alloy) because vanadium pentoxide corrodes everything else.
Today the American Petroleum Institute has a specification to get the vanadium down to very low levels. I had to work on a problem very briefly up in the tar sands of Alberta. There's a lot of vanadium in some of those tar sands. The American Petroleum Institute has a specification of a way to get vanadium out of the crude. And there's only two materials you can use that won't be corroded by vanadium pentoxide. One is some ceramic, which is of course very brittle — and you have to run this furnace to get rid of the vanadium at, like, 2,000 degrees centigrade. The other one — I can't remember — it might even be a vanadium-titanium or aluminum-titanium alloy, something, it's a very expensive alloy. Anyway, they had a whole problem in their furnace up against the tar sands and they wanted to know.
Brief mention — Tom got hired on a tar sands job in Alberta because they had the same vanadium problem Wolff had diagnosed at Boston Edison decades earlier. Modern processes remove the vanadium, but earlier operators didn't know.
Today the American Petroleum Institute has specs on getting the vanadium out. There is really only one alloy — a nickel-chrome alloy — that can survive vanadium. I actually got hired briefly on a job up in the tar sands area of Alberta, because they have vanadium in their oil too. They have processes now to get rid of the vanadium, but back then no one really knew about it, because the US always had the nice crude from Texas that didn't have this problem. John Wolff knew about it at the right time and found the right client who had a big enough problem that he could put a couple of kids through college on that one answer. You've got to be at the right spot at the right time.