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…

My original intention was for the next discussion to be on cracking processes, but in retrospect it would be better to discuss what is required to crack hydrocarbons to produce usable transport fuels.

In the early days of refining the refineries we geared up to produce naphtha, kerosine, diesel and atmospheric residue. The atmospheric residue was frequently used as fuel oil for power generation, steam production and marine applications ( steam turbine and marine diesels).  This type of processing was known as hydroskimming. In the developed world very few hydroskimming  refineries now exist as these refineries cannot extract the value in the atmospheric residue or residual fuels. In the 1960 many refineries were fitted out with vacuum distillation units and fluid catalytic cracking units (FCC). Sometimes a thermal cracker or vis-breaker were also employed. In the 1970’s hydrocracking and coking became available as the demand for ever more gasoline and…

El Segundo Refinery Fire

There has been muted press output on the El Segundo refinery fire the same news line being copied to many reports.