Abstract
Catalytic cracking is the thermal decomposition of petroleum constituents in the presence of a catalyst. Refineries use the process cracking to correct the imbalance between the market demand for gasoline and the excess of heavy, high boiling range products (as well as heavy oil and tar sand bitumen) resulting from the distillation of the crude oil.
The typical catalytic cracker that accepted a single-source gas oil feedstock is almost extinct and in the modern refinery is more inclined to be a blend of several high-boiling fractions – often with heavy oil and/or residuum as part of the blend, which has led to the development of residuum fluid catalytic cracking units. In addition to designing new units, as part of the evolutionary process many of the older catalytic cracking units were modified to accommodate more complex feedstocks as well as feedstock blends containing residua. Feedstocks to the modern units now range from blends of gas oil fractions (included in normal heavier feedstocks for upgrading) to residua (reduced crude), heavy oil, and even tar sand bitumen.
Fluid catalytic cracking is the most important conversion process used in petroleum refineries to convert the high-boiling feedstock constituents to more valuable naphtha, olefin gases, as well as other products and is likely to remain predominant in the refining industry for at least another three-to-five decades.
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Speight, J.G. (2017). Fluid-Bed Catalytic Cracking. In: Hsu, C.S., Robinson, P.R. (eds) Springer Handbook of Petroleum Technology. Springer Handbooks. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49347-3_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49347-3_19
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