CNOOC’s world’s first diesel aromatics adsorption separation technology achieves million-ton-scale application and full-process implementation

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Through years of continuous research efforts, a young research team from CNOOC Tianjin Chemical Research and Design Institute has developed the world’s first diesel aromatic adsorption and separation technology, which is now in use on a scale of millions of tons and across the entire production process. At present, the main products of China’s refining industry are gasoline and diesel, with a low yield of chemical products. Li Bin explained that as China’s economic growth slows down and alternative energy sources develop rapidly, demand for diesel has already reached its peak; demand for gasoline will also reach its peak by 2025. There is a serious surplus of refined oil products, which calls for urgent industrial transformation and upgrading. At the same time, as people’s living standards continue to improve, the demand for chemical raw materials such as olefins and aromatics is on the rise. Developing oil and chemical integration technologies to achieve high-value utilization of excess oil products, and to promote the transformation, upgrading, as well as improvement in efficiency of the traditional refining industry, has become a focus of attention for the entire sector. They creatively proposed a diesel adsorption separation technique to directly separate aromatics from the oil. This represents a disruption to the processing processes of the traditional refining industry.