Development Trends of Petrochemical Equipment in China

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1. Development trends of equipment: 1) Larger size, higher pressure, greater efficiency, as well as higher sulfur and acid content; 2) New materials, new structures, new processes, and new technologies; 3) Integration of design, manufacturing, and operation; 4) Safety, stability, long operational life, full load operation, and optimized performance. 2. General equipment for large-scale oil refining. (1) Gas compressors are key devices for generating pressure energy and transporting gases; they include turbine compressors and reciprocating compressors. Countries such as Japan, the United States, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland have relatively advanced design and manufacturing technologies in this field. Over the years, through domestic development or by overcoming various challenges after introduction, significant breakthroughs have been achieved. Among them, the horizontal split centrifugal compressors and axial flow compressors are close to the advanced level of similar international products. (2) Centrifugal compressors: The international trend is toward larger capacities, with the development of compressor products that are high-pressure, low-flow, low-noise, and highly efficient. There are over a dozen domestic manufacturers, notably Shenyang Blower Factory, Shanghai Blower Factory, Shaanxi Blower Factory, and others. Domestic centrifugal compressors with high technology, high parameters, high quality, and special features still cannot meet the demands; about 50% of them still have to be imported from abroad. In addition, there is still a gap compared to foreign countries in terms of technical level, quality, and completeness, and no mature experience exists in the design and manufacture of large gas compressors. (3) Heat exchangers: With the trend toward larger sizes and higher efficiency, heat exchangers abroad are also becoming larger, and there is a development toward lower temperature differences and lower pressure losses. Advances in heat exchanger finned tubes include T-fin tubes, low-thread fin tubes, diamond-shaped fin tubes, scaled tubes, aluminum porous surface heat transfer tubes, helical groove tubes, spirally twisted oval tubes, and more. 3. Vigorously develop high-end equipment manufacturing to achieve a strategic transformation from scale to strength. Developing the high-end equipment manufacturing industry is an important means to promote the economic transformation and upgrading of the sector and to move from a large-scale presence to a stronger position. At present, five key areas including offshore engineering equipment and intelligent manufacturing equipment have been identified as the focus of China’s high-end equipment manufacturing industry. Efforts are being made to develop large-scale oil refining and chemical processing facilities with capacities of tens of millions of tons for oil refining and millions of tons for ethylene production, aiming to drive development through differentiated products and high-value-added technologies and to accelerate the growth of the high-end equipment manufacturing sector. Standardization and modularization are tactical measures to transform \"Made in China\" into \"Created in China\". Once again, with the advancement of oil processing technologies, the simplest equipment used in crude oil distillation – such as towers, furnaces, heat exchangers, pumps, and tanks – is no longer sufficient to meet the new requirements. Catalytic reaction processes have become dominant, giving rise to gas-solid fluidized bed reactors and liquid-gas-solid three-phase reactors. Large-scale low-temperature spherical tanks (at -30°C and 1.72 MPa) represent the direction of development for the future. Finally, as the variety of polyolefins increases, there is a need for many new types of equipment that require high levels of technical expertise, such as ethylene cracking furnaces, plate-fin coolers, ultra-high-pressure reactors at 350 MPa, propylene loop reactors, and various polymerization reactors equipped with stirrers. The key equipment required for producing millions of tons of ethylene includes cracking gas compressors, propylene compressors, and ethylene compressors. For large-scale ethylene production, massive centrifugal compressors are used, with a capacity of 45,000 kW each; these compressors require high reliability and a long service life. Furthermore, among general petrochemical equipment, complete sets of equipment for 300,000 t/a of synthetic ammonia production, as well as large-scale air separation units with a capacity of 60,000 m3/h, represent promising areas for future research and development. Regarding the development of efficient equipment, this includes cogeneration in large enterprises, hierarchical utilization of energy (equipment for generating steam through gas turbine power generation and high-temperature gas purification systems); recovery of high-temperature thermal energy, catalytic power generation using flue gas at 700°C, and steam production via waste heat boilers; recovery of low-temperature thermal energy, utilization of heat sources below 300°C (heat pumps, high-efficiency heat exchangers for low temperature differences); recovery of chemical energy from CO boilers; recovery of pressure energy from high-pressure liquids using hydraulic turbines; as well as optimization of heat exchange networks and steam networks. 4. Integration of production, R&D, design, and manufacturing; collaboration among industry, academia, research institutions, and users to promote innovative development in the manufacturing sector. On the one hand, for different types of spontaneous industry-university-research cooperation networks or industrial R&D alliances, it is necessary to **enhance innovation in investment and financing mechanisms, and promote their development through guidance and support, thereby facilitating the connection between enterprises, financial institutions, and social funds**. On the other hand, led by key enterprises in the industry, universities and research institutions with strong research capabilities should be brought together to form various forms of industry-university-research R&D alliances, so as to fully mobilize the resources and efforts of all parties to advance the technology research, development, and application promotion under the initiative of “Made in China 2025”. 5. Vigorously improve the digital and intelligent capabilities of oil equipment. Taking advantage of the new wave of scientific and technological and industrial revolutions as well as changes in the global manufacturing landscape, it is necessary to promote the deep integration of next-generation information technologies with the oil equipment manufacturing industry, thereby continuously raising the technical and manufacturing standards of such equipment to meet the needs of offshore oil exploration and development in China. 6. Strengthen the manufacturing foundation and enhance product design capabilities. The overall level of these \"four foundations\" – core basic components and parts, key basic materials, advanced basic manufacturing processes, and industrial technology foundations – plays a crucial role in determining the quality of products. They constitute the basis for improving the quality of Chinese-made products, and therefore deserve great attention. Strengthen the industrial foundation of Made in China by focusing on specialization and relying on standardization. At the same time, efforts should be made to promote and apply advanced design technologies, develop design tool software, and establish a platform for sharing design resources; policies should be introduced to encourage innovative design, shifting from processing and designing on behalf of others to exporting products with original brands. 7. Make efforts to expand overseas markets in order to achieve greater growth for the industry. China’s oil equipment offers price advantages, being generally lower than international prices. Some equipment with high usage volumes and low technical complexity is actively expanding its share of the international market.