Introduction
Inferior diesels are of high sulfur, nitrogen, aromatics and olefin content, low cetane number, poor stability, thus it cannot be used profitably. SINOPEC has developed a medium-pressure hydro-upgrading technology (MHUG) to convert such diesels into high-value products. This technology is designed to upgrade a variety of diesel feedstocks, including FCC (or RFCC and MIP) LCO, coker gas oil, straight diesel (AGO) or their blend with straight run light VGO (LVGO) to produce superior products, such as naphtha with high potential aromatics as feedstock for catalytic reforming, low sulfur diesel with high cetane number as a clean diesel blend, and the tail oil (unconverted oil) with low BMCI as ethylene plant feedstock.
Technical Characteristics
1. MHUG is an advanced, mature, reliable and cost-effective technology with relative low operating pressure, low chemical hydrogen consumption and low energy consumption.
2. MHUG has good feedstock adaptability. This technology can be used to treat LCO, coker gas oil, straight run diesel (AGO), LVGO or blends of them.
3. MHUG has operating flexibility with two operating modes, once-through mode and unconverted oil recycling mode. These two operating modes can be switched flexibly. Depending on user’s demand, different products’ slates can be selected: maximum catalytic reforming feed yield, maximum diesel yield, or maximum unconverted oil yield and simultaneously producing jet fuel.
4. The product yields are high, and the products are superior in quality.
5. The operating range of the process unit is 60~110% of designed capacity.
6. Flexibly combined hydrotreating and hydrocracking catalysts system is used and the catalysts have high activity and good stability with the first run period of 3 ~ 5 years.
7. MHUG technology has many commercial applications, and there are no special safety and environmental protection problems during production.