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Risultati sfruttabili
Oil refining industry are challenged to improve the quality of their products due to environmental and safety reasons. The problems related to air quality can be seen especially well in big cities when the weather pattern prevents vertical air circulation. This can lead to severe traffic restrictions. The polluted air consists of harmful components such as carbon monoxide, unburned hydrocarbons, nitric oxides and some toxic substances. In the USA authorities e.g. EPA have issued several rules and orders to enforce the refining industry to improve the quality of their products. In Europe, the slow development towards this direction has taken place. It seems, without few exceptions, that the refining industry will improve their product quality only after obligatory laws by EC or by the individual states.
From the industrial point of view it is advantageous to produce environmentally acceptable fuel components from cheap raw materials. A good example of this is the production of MTBE, which replaces the leaded additives, lowers tail pipe emissions and converts highly volatile isobutene (a light olefin) to a valuable gasoline component. At present, light olefins are produced as a by-product from steam and catalytic cracking processes or they are made from LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) or light condensate via the dehydrogenation. These by-products are, however, currently fully utilized for the production of MTBE and the alkylate in today's refineries. The dehydrogenation is applied to increase the amount of light olefins, but as based on the existing technology it can be used only in the areas where a low price LPG or condensate is available because of the economics of scale. These world scale MTBE plants are located in oil and gas producing countries, outside Europe, where the capacities can exceed 500.000 MTPY (metric tons per year).
The target of this project was to develop a new dehydrogenation technology, which would enable the production of light olefins from existing refinery streams emphasizing the efficient use of raw materials and energy resources. The developed technology is based on the novel catalytic materials, which have both heat and electricity conductive properties allowing a completely new way of heat transfer to compensate the endothermic reaction heat. The intention was to simplify the whole process by reducing amount of needed equipment and by doing so the process would be feasible on a smaller, refinery, scale compared to existing technologies.
The development of the catalyst was more difficult than anticipated at the beginning. The results obtained in the laboratory and bench scale equipment did not justify planning and building of the pilot scale reactor. During the course of the project it was decided to put as much an effort on the catalyst development as possible since the catalyst was clearly identified as a heart of the process. As a result a new, improved way to manufacture the catalyst was developed. The catalyst prepared by this new method has much better physical properties than the old catalyst and thus its expected lifetime is much longer. Unfortunately, the catalytic properties were not significantly improved.
According to the original plan, the goal of the project was to have the new developed process available for licensing two years after completion of the project. However, neither the development of the catalyst or the heating system was progressed according to the plan indicated in the Project Programme. Due to this the industrial goals are not met and the process cannot be commercialized within two years as planned.
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