最新Producing Low Sulfur Gasoline Reliably.pdfVIP

Producing Low Sulfur Gasoline Reliably Kerry Rock and Scott Shorey CDTECH Introduction Refiners in North America and Europe are making progress toward reduction of sulfur in the gasoline pool to meet upcoming fuels standards. Several FCC gasoline desulfurization plants are now in operation meeting current requirements with additional projects underway to meet even lower sulfur specifications in the near future. Unfortunately, refiners are discovering that some of the new HDS units will cause problems with the operation of their FCC units. This is because conventional fixed bed FCC gasoline HDS units are unable to run throughout the complete operating cycle of a modern FCC unit without having to shut down for regeneration or replacement of catalyst. As a result, the refiner must either have a very expensive FCC shutdown or spend significant capital cost in addition to the HDS investment to correct the problem. Technology from CDTECH can prevent this problem without additional capital cost and give the refiner a reliable operation that will not interrupt the operation of the FCC unit for catalyst problems. Background Reduction of sulfur in FCC gasoline involves converting the contained sulfur to hydrogen sulfide in most available processes. This is done by reaction with hydrogen in the presence of a hydrotreating catalyst such as CoMo. However, other reactions can occur due to the presence of olefinic compounds in the feed. The distribution of sulfur and olefins by distillation cut is shown in Figure 1 FCC Gasoline Feed Composition for a typical FCC gasoline with 1300 ppm of total sulfur, representing 12000 4 untreated FCC feed. The light ends 10000 are very low in sulfur (primarily m 8000