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Introduction
The need for oil and gas as a transportation fuel remains significant, even with the contribution from other fossil fuels like coal and natural gas1. Light oil stocks have been exhausted as a result, and oil prices have increased and become more constrained2. As consequence, the amount of light oil decreases while the quantity of heavy oils increases along with contaminants like metals, sulfur, asphaltenes, nitrogen, etc. These contaminants increase the cost of oil processing, which lowers the oil’s desirability. Recently, new technologies have been investigated to enhance the amount and quality of fuel for transportation derived from natural sources other than conventional one’s crude1. Research is currently being conducted in a number of other areas, such as the production of biofuels, the conversion of gas to liquid, and the refining of unconventional oil1, 2–3. Several technologies have been researched for enhancing heavy oil output for transportation fuel4. The most effective of these methods is hydrocracking, which produces low selectivity to coke and high selectivity to middle distillate. The crude stock used in hydro cracking often has large concentrations of heavy oil-containing Ni and V metals, which are easily poisoned or deactivated by traditional acid catalysts5, 6–7. These and other metals have made it necessary to seek for substances that can successfully extract them from crude oil during hydro-processing. Finding a way to pretreat the heavy crude oil to lower the metal ion content before it enters the downstream processing units would be a potential solution to solve this issue. Because catalysts would not become poisoned as quickly, their lifetime and throughput rate would both increase, resulting in a cost reduction.
Since zeolites have a large surface area and exceptional catalytic and ionic exchange properties, they have been used in numerous industrial applications such as water softening, heterogeneous catalysis, separation, and environmental remediation8,9. They can also be used to effectively remove metallic ions from crude oil. Regardless, zeolite is a type of crystalline alumino-silicate mineral that originates by synthesizing three-dimensional tetrahedral molecule configurations that are linked to O2 participating atoms10. Zeolites are undoubtedly ion exchangers and have been used as a catalyst for the catalytic cracking of...