Thread Content
On February 21, the 60,000-ton/year 1-butene project at Daxie Petrochemical fully entered the stage of feeding and commissioning tests. The unit employs a complete set of processes including \"selective hydrogenation + pre-distillation + 2-butene isomerization + etherification to remove isobutylene + precise distillation\", and the resulting products meet the requirements for polymer-grade materials. After the completion of the Phase III project for distillate oil processing at Daxie Petrochemical, about 100,000 tons of tetra-carbon products containing ether are produced annually, of which a large portion consists of 1-butene. The C4 separation method is primarily used. 1-Butene is an important chemical raw material; it can be used as a comonomer for LLDPE and as a monomer for the polymerization of poly-1-butene, as well as a key raw material for various chemical products such as isooctene, butadiene, and butane. Currently, the production processes for 1-butene worldwide can be roughly divided into two types: one is the C4 separation method, which involves separating components from a C4 mixture, and the other is the ethylene dimerization method, which uses the products resulting from the dimerization of ethylene. Among these, the ethylene dimerization method is not in use on a global scale at present due to its high costs; as a result, the C4 separation process is the one that is predominantly employed today. The production process for 1-butene has a long history; after years of development, it is now relatively mature with excellent technical specifications. According to research conducted by Pingtouge, the providers of 1-butene separation technologies abroad mainly include Germany’s Kruup Uhde technology, Japan’s Zeon process, Japan Petroleum Corporation’s NPC technology, IFP separation technology, and UOP separation technology. These technologies are largely similar to one another, and all of them can be used to produce polymeric-grade 1-butene products. Research on 1-butene in China began in the 1990s. Driven by the development of the polyethylene industry, Chinese research institutions started working on the production of 1-butene and quickly mastered the key production technologies. After years of development, the industrial production of 1-butene in China currently relies mainly on either C4 separation or ethylene dimerization. Due to the high price of ethylene, the economic viability of ethylene dimerization is poor, which is why C4 separation is the predominant method used at present. Currently, there are many suppliers of 1-butene production processes in China; before 2015, the distillation and extraction processes developed by Yantai University and Qilu Research Institute were the most common. With technological advancements, there has been a rapid growth in providers of extraction processes; companies such as UOP, the Beijing Institute of Chemical Technology, Ocean University, and Lanzhou Research Institute all possess processes for producing 1-butene. In China, the C4 materials that can be used as raw materials for the production of 1-butene mainly include mixed C4, etherified C4, stripped C4, and coal-derived high-olefin C4. Before 2016, the industry primarily used C4 feedstocks derived from petroleum refining, chemical manufacturing, and ethylene production. However, with the development of the coal chemical industry, the supply of C4 resources derived from coal-based high-olefin production in China increased, which provided favorable conditions for the separation of 1-butene using such C4 feedstocks. This in turn accelerated the pace of 1-butene production through coal chemical processes in China.