Ethane to ethylene
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Is the process of producing ethylene from ethane mature? Are there any cases of industrial application in China?
Isn’t that immature? I always thought I was mature
According to some sources, it is quite mature, but no examples of industrial application have been found
Are there any special technologies for producing ethylene from ethane? In the fast boat ethylene project, at least one of the cracking furnaces is used for the cracking of light hydrocarbons; that is, the C2 and C3 alkanes separated and recovered from the ethylene cracking gas are used as cracking feedstock, with only a higher cracking temperature being required.
Ethane thermal cracking technology is well-developed. Facilities for producing ethylene through ethane cracking are mainly located in the United States, Canada, the Middle East, and Western Europe; domestically, there is a shortage of ethane sources. The main domestic plants include Yanshan Petrochemical, Qingdao Refining, and Yangzi Petrochemical.
The companies you mentioned do exist, but none of them produce ethylene solely from ethane; I’m interested in ethylene production facilities that operate on a million-ton scale using ethane.
Is the technology for producing ethylene from ethane well-developed? The process is simple, and the investment is much lower than that for naphtha. It’s just that the source of ethane raw material might be a major problem.
The key is to resolve the issue of raw material sourcing. On a larger scale, this is the case in the United States and Saudi Arabia; the raw material in the U.S. comes from shale gas, while in Saudi Arabia it comes from ethane gas associated with oil fields. There are no ethane-to-ethylene plants with a capacity of millions of tons in the world yet.
China currently has no ethane cracking units that have been built or put into operation; the several million-ton-scale ethane cracking plants for ethylene production announced in the country are nothing but illusions. Bazhou in Xinjiang is planning an ethylene plant with a capacity of 800,000 tons, which will use 1.02 million tons of ethane as the feedstock for cracking. It would be worth keeping an eye on this project; if it is built, it will constitute a world-class ethane cracking facility. This project is a joint venture between Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture ** and CNPC in a 90:10 share ratio; it uses ethane produced as a by-product from a local natural gas processing plant with a capacity of 2*6 billion NM3/year as raw material, making it a relatively reliable project.
With current technology, what is the yield of ethylene that can be achieved? What are the by-products?
A cracking unit fed with 100% ethane yields about 78% ethylene; the by-products include H2, CH4, C3H6, butadiene, C4, C5, benzene, toluene, etc. In contrast, the ethylene yield of a naphtha cracker is only 30%, so naturally there are more other valuable by-products. Just in terms of ethylene production, ethane cracking is currently the most economical method, with the lowest unit cost. At present, only the United States and the Middle East have such resource advantages, with them being cheap and readily available. It’s a shame that so much capital in China is invested in MTO/CTO; it would be better to use that money on the development of technologies for shale gas exploration and extraction. . . . .