Onshore refinery reforming sees a wave of development
Thread Content
This year, following the commissioning of 1 million-ton reformation plants at Hebei Xinhai Petrochemical and 600,000-ton reformation plants at Shandong Hui Feng, Shandong Zhenghe plans to build a 1 million-ton reformation plant in 2016. Upon hearing this news, local refineries became eager to get involved, aiming to secure a place in the future landscape of refineries; thus, a wave of upgrades to processing facilities in the field of petroleum product refinement began to emerge.
With the concentrated expansion of reforming capacity in domestic refineries, and due to the weak growth in the production of naphtha from these refineries, there is a high likelihood that a supply shortage of naphtha resources in Shandong will occur in the future. A situation of shortage of raw materials for reforming processes in domestic refineries may not be an unfounded concern.
As is well known, catalytic reforming refers to the process of rearranging the molecular structures of hydrocarbons in gasoline fractions under the action of a catalyst to form new molecular structures. The main products include high-octane reformed gasoline, benzene, toluene, xylene, naphtha, reformed residue oil, hydrogen, and so on. The recent surge in the trend toward reprocessing is, on the one hand, driven by the rigid demand for high-octane reprocessed gasoline resulting from the upgrading of fuel quality in eastern provinces and cities ； On the other hand, it is also an early move by local refineries to diversify their products and vigorously expand into the chemical industry.