Development of a New Hydrocracking Catalyst for Distillate Production That Can be Used for Refineries Making Lube Products

Hydrocracking is a refining process that converts heavy, high-boiling feedstock molecules to smaller, lower boiling products through carbon-carbon bond breaking with hydrogenation.  Modern catalysts have been formulated to provide refiners the flexibility to tune their operation to products more heavily weighted to the naphtha pool or to products more heavily weighted to the diesel pool.

Hydrocracking catalysts are bifunctional.  The cracking function is usually provided by an acidic support such as amorphous oxides and/or zeolites and the  hydrogenating/dehydrogenating function is typically provide by non-noble metal sulfides such as Ni/Mo or Ni/W. A new catalyst was discovered with enhanced performance.  New materials and new methods of preparation has led to improvement in activity and total distillate yield as well as improvement in the viscosity index of the unconverted oil.   Detailed characterization was done to understand the fundamental differences that developed in the catalysts with the use of new materials or different preparation methods. 

Performance of the catalyst is measured by performance in a pilot plant; then characterization aids in the understanding of the changes that can relate to the observed performance.  Recently a catalyst with improved distillate yield was developed and characterized.  This talk will focus on characterization of the catalysts which provided insight on the performance