No. of Recommendations: 6
I would hate to get into a Shell/Esso tiff
No tiff here. Catalytic cracking to produce high octane components and many others was a well known process prior to the advent of fluid bed catalytic cracking. The ability to make 100 octane gasoline was known.
But prior to the Esso process innovation catalytic cracking was a fixed bed process. Heated feedstock would be fed into a bed of cracking catalyst and products produced. However this also resulted in a buildup of carbon on the catalyst which lost efficiency. So the feedstock would be cut off and air used to burn the carbon off the catalyst. It was a cyclical process.
The Esso process breakthrough was to fluidize the cracking catalyst so that it could be moved around like a liquid. The catalyst was made a finely ground powder which could be suspended in the heated high boiling point liquid feedstock. As the cracking reaction took place, the feedstock was converted to vapors, suspending the catalyst as a fluid. At the top of the reactor cyclones separated the catalyst from the vapors. It was then sent to the regenerator where carbon deposits were burnt off regenerating the catalyst and heating it. It was then returned to the reactor as a slurry to mix with the feedstock. Thus the cyclic process was converted to a continuous process with significantly increased throughputs.
When this process was demonstrated in a 100 B/D pilot plant, it proved so successful that construction of the first commercial fluid catalytic cracking unit (FCCU)was started while development work was still underway on the pilot plant. (It was still standing in 1955 when I started work at ERDL.)
The rush was to bring significant catalytic cracking capacity online as quickly as possible to provide more capacity for, among other things, components for 100 octane gasoline. WWII was a major influence.
The FCCU process now dominates catalytic cracking with some 400 commercial units worldwide.
The development was a process development. Fluid bed catalytic processing has also now been extended to other refinery processes.
So no tiff intended on the origin of 100 octane ave-gas.
The Germans continued to use cyclic processing. Their 100 octane ave-gas supplies were very limited compared with the allies. Ditto Japan. Of course, both countries had limited access to oil supplies. This proved a major, even critical, advantage for the Allies.
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I wish the general public had a better understanding of all the technology that is needed to provide the easy access we enjoy to gasoline, lubricants, plastics,clothing, and other essentials of modern life.
