Grandiose Oil Refining

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Before the end of the 19th century, world oil refining plants primarily used batch distillation in reactors or continuous distillation in reactors, mainly to produce kerosene for lighting. Driven by the development of the automotive industry, the liquid-phase cracking process was industrialized in 1913, enabling the thermal cracking of petroleum fractions to produce more gasoline. In 1930, a delayed coking unit was built to produce light oil products and petroleum coke. In 1936, the fixed-bed catalytic cracking process was put into industrial use, marking a major breakthrough in the development of the petroleum refining industry. Subsequently, fluidized-bed catalytic cracking units were introduced (1942), followed by moving-bed catalytic cracking units (1943). In 1949, the fixed-bed platinum reforming process was successfully developed, followed by the fluidized-bed catalytic reforming (1952) and moving-bed catalytic reforming (1955) processes. In 1959, the first set of hydrocracking units was put into operation in the United States. Catalytic cracking catalysts containing molecular sieves appeared in the 1960s. Modern refining technology has gradually become more complete. As the crude oil supplied has become increasingly heavier and of lower quality, more new processes for converting sulfur-containing heavy oils and for producing cleaner petroleum products have emerged; processes such as S-Zorb and ISOTHERMING have been successfully developed. At present, production technologies for clean fuels characterized by desulfurization, clean refining technologies, as well as technologies for building new refineries and expanding existing ones, are being gradually developed in developed countries ； With crude oil prices fluctuating at high levels, techniques to improve light yield have regained attention. Coking, catalytic cracking of residue, and residue hydrogenation have gradually become the key technologies for the deep processing of heavy oil. Gasification technology is widely used in residue processing, while fluidized-bed residue hydrogenation and suspended-bed hydrogenation processes have been put into industrial use. Production technologies for cleaner oil products such as hydrodesulfurization of catalytic cracking feedstocks, hydrogenation or adsorption desulfurization of catalytic cracking gasoline, technologies to increase the octane number of gasoline, diesel desulfurization technologies, diesel dearomatization technologies, and technologies to improve the cetane number of diesel have also been successively implemented on an industrial scale. Technologies such as catalytic cracking for the production of large amounts of low-carbon olefins, catalytic reforming to increase the yield of light aromatics, and hydrocracking to boost ethylene production enhance the yield of high-value products in refineries through the mutual supply of refining and petrochemical feedstocks as well as energy integration.