On January 8, 2021, the largest in China continuous catalytic reforming (CCR) unit (with a capacity of 2.6 Mt/a) at SINOCHEM Quanzhou Petrochemical Company using the SINOPEC’s counter-current CCR technology with independent intellectual property rights had successfully transformed the catalyst from “black burning” to “white burning”, denoting that the catalyst had good regeneration performance along with good product quality and hereby the catalyst can enter the normal production phase. The successful start-up of the said CCR unit has symbolized the great achievement in large-scale application of countercurrent CCR technology to bread down the foreign technical monopoly on large CCR units rated at more than 2 Mt/a.China has been growing out from nothing by making breakthroughs in manufacture of large CCR units to lay a solid foundation for creating super-large equipment.

This process unit adopts the counter-current continuous catalytic reforming technology jointly developed by the SINOPEC Engineering Incorporation (SEI) and the SINOPEC Research Institute of Petroleum Processing (RIPP)coupled with the CCR catalyst PS-VI developed by RIPP.The CCR unit is mainly composed of 5 sections, viz.: the feedstock pretreatment, the continuous catalytic reforming,the continuous catalyst regeneration, the aromatics extraction,and the pressure swing adsorption (PSA). This counter-current CCR process is a first innovative one in the world, which is designed to make the reaction materials and catalyst move in the reverse direction during the catalytic reaction. The more difficult reactions can take place on the catalyst with higher activity, and the more easy reactions can be carried out on the catalyst with lower activity due to carbon deposition, so that the catalyst activity can nicely match up to the reforming reaction procedure, resulting in an improved reaction efficiency and a remarkably reduced energy consumption.