My apologies for the long interlude since my last posting but I have been rather busy with the collapsing petrochemical industry in Europe, most of which is due to the high cost of feedstocks and very unfavourable governments who are placing huge burdens on businesses, such as ESG, DIE, and CSDDD legislation.

The topic of this discussion is hydroprocessing which is a generic term that covers quite a broad range of processes in the refining and petrochemical industries. My focus will be on refining and hydroprocessing that covers two main processes:

Hydrotreating - used widely for upgrading both feedstocks and finished products

Hydrocracking - used for upgrading low quality feedstocks and products, generally heavy gas oils.

This is a belated follow up to my last posting on Fluid Catalytic Cracking (FCC). My health is still a limitation and I have also have to work. In this post I will explain more on the innovations both in equipment design and catalyst technology.

Over the past 40 years FCC designs have proliferated with new innovations to increase flexibility of operation and widen the product scope.

FCC’s are primarily a gasoline machine that also produces some olefinic LPG and a rather poor quality diesel fraction. There is now significant progress being made with new FCC designs that increase feedstocks for petrochemical production, boost gasoline octane, and process poorer quality feedstocks, including atmospheric residue. New catalysts have been developed that can work in conjunction with new hardware designs, that dramatically widen the operating envelope. 

Huge leaps in catalyst technology have been made that can extend the life of the catalyst, tolerate…

My apologies of the rather long interlude from my last posting. I am not getting any younger and some health issues have had to take precedence. The good news is that I now appear to have reached a stable plateau for the time being (until next time).

In this briefing I will go into detail on Fluid Catalytic cracking which is one of 3 main technologies for upgrading heavy distillates.

As usual I have attached the full presentation to the post- see bottom.

Exxon developed the first FCC (model 1) at Baton Rouge LA in 1942.  Since then FCC technology has evolved via many iterations. Primarily a process for gasoline production, it extended the amount of gasoline that could produced from a barrel of oil. Notwithstanding the FCC gasoline has very desirable octane values which reduced the overall demand for octane boosting additives.

FCC’s also produce significant amounts of olefinic…