PetroChina Achieves Breakthrough in Mesoporous Zeolite Technology

Following the breakthrough in the technology for development and application of mesoporous zeolite developed by PetroChina’s Research Institute of Petrochemical Industry (RIPI), the said mesoporous zeolite has been successfully applied in the 1.2 Mt/a RFCC unit at the Lanzhou Petrochemical Company.

The research team of RIPI after having been involved in catalyst research activities for more than ten years has made breakthrough in the study of the mesoporous zeolite structure, such as: the study on creating a zeolite synthesis system to achieve the quasi-crystalline assembly at the zeolite pore walls for improving the catalyst stability, the research on providing high content of four-coordinated aluminum to increase acidity, and the work aimed at inventing a low-cost method for synthesis of mesoporous zeolite using crystal seeds in a highly concentrated system, making the hydrothermal stability of zeolite increased by 2.5 times, its acidity increased by 2 times, and its production cost reduced by 70%. Based on the above-mentioned achievements, the project team has used the high-performance mesoporous zeolite as the functional component (with a trade name of MASTER-1)to develop the FCC catalyst LPC-65 for deeply reducing the olefin content in FCC naphtha, which has been adopted at the Lanzhou Petrochemical Company since September 2018.

The commercial application of this catalyst has revealed that in the course of processing the increasingly deteriorating FCC feedstocks, the catalyst consumption was reduced by 30% along with an overall improvement in product distribution, as evidenced by a drop of olefin content in gasoline from 35% to 30% and even to a maximum value of 28.3%. The enhanced olefin reduction performance of FCC catalyst LPC-65 has provided technical support to an increased economic benefit of Lanzhou Petrochemical Company in the course of producing gasoline that can meet the national gasoline quality standard VI. It is said that this is the first case for using mesoporous zeolite in the million-ton-class FCC unit in the world, which has proved that the zeolite MASTER-1 has excellent hydrothermal stability and good heavy oil conversion ability.