Coke to Work: Turning Venezuelan Petroleum Coke Stockpiles into Metals, Fuel and Graphite Composite

Between 15 and 30 million tonnes of petroleum coke lie in open piles in Venezuela. The material has no local use, export does not pay because ports and logistics are costly and US sanctions hinder sales, and new coke is added every day. This paper treats the stockpile as feedstock rather than waste. Petroleum coke is carbon with sulfur, vanadium and nickel locked into it, and these impurities are exactly what make it useless: burning it is excluded by the sulfur, and the metals interfere with graphitization. We describe a three-step route that starts with cleaning. Step one removes vanadium and nickel by leaching, without burning carbon to make ash, and separates the solutions into a vanadium concentrate and a nickel concentrate using the ARBOK fractionation approach; the extracted sulfur goes to sulfuric acid and fertilizer. Step two presses the cleaned coke fines with a binder, up to 15% of the mass, into fuel briquettes for industrial users. Step three graphitizes cleaned coke and adds TEGA, ARBOK's graphene-like material, to obtain a conductive composite for electrodes and batteries. The three products, briquettes for volume, graphite and composite for price, and metals for value, allow processing to outpace the arrival of new coke. We specify a development program of three series on real coke from the Orinoco piles and the export terminal at Jose.