Catalytic cracking first commercial units

The first commercial unit employing Solid Phosphoric Acid was built to polymerize catalytically propylene and butylenes from thermal cracking into motor gasoline. The product has a research method (F-l) octane... 

The first full-scale refinery test demonstration of ZSM-5 in catalytic cracking was made in the TOO unit of the Neste Oy refinery in Naantali, Finland (10). The catalyst used in this application was a composite catalyst containing both REY and ZSM-5. This commercial demonstration was a success with RON increasing up to 4 numbers. Since this initial demonstration, ZSM-5 has been used in over thirty-five units (both TOO and FCC) ranging in size from 6,000 to 90,000 barrels per day (BPD). 

Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) has been commercially used since the mid 1980s on fired equipment with the hrst application on a boiler in 1976. The first SCR unit installed on a fluid catalytic cracking unit was at Saibu Oil Company in Yamaguchi, Japan in April 1986. Since then, nearly two dozen ECC units have installed SCR units to remove NO from the flue gas and more are slated to be built in the future. Vendors and catalyst suppliers of this technology include Haldor-Topsoe, Mitsubishi Power Systems, Hitachi, Technip, BASE, and Cormetech. 

One of the first success of zeolites as catalysts, and the first commercial molecular shape selective catalytic process, was the use of erionite in a post-reforming process named selectoforming (39). Ihis 8 MR zeolite was able, based on the principle of size exclusion, to selectively crack the short chain n-parafiins to produce LPG. To avoid the deactivation by coke NiS was deposited on the zeolite. The erionite based catalyst is generally located at the bottom of the last reactor of the reformer unit and operates then at the reformer pressure, and at the temperature of the last reformer reactor. When more flexibility was to be achieved from the selectoforming, the catalyst is introduced... 

Socony-Vacuum utilized Thermofor kilns to bum off coke deposited on Fuller s earth during the filtration of lube oils (57). They adapted one of these kilns to introduce the first moving bed catalytic cracking process. The first semi-commercial 500 BPD (barrel per day) Thermofor Catalytic Cracking (TCC) unit went on stream in the Paulsboro refinery in 1941. It utilized bucket elevators to transport catalyst from the reactor to the regenerator. In 1943, Socony-Vacuum installed a 10,000 BPD TCC unit (52) at a subsidiary refinery. 

Jersey Standard had many officials, from the president down, serving on various committees devoted to preparation for war in advance of the U.S. entry into WWII. In the case of fluid catalytic cracking, Jersey Standard was driven not by perceived war demand but by the need to find a way to produce gasoline for autos that could compete with the fuel produced by Houdry catalytic cracking units. However, without the wartime conditions, it is likely that Jersey Standard would have taken longer than three years to go from research to an operating commercial unit. The first commercial fluid units were tremendously expensive because of their overpowering size and complexity (55). 

---