Defying the law of diminishing returns

The activity improvements that Criterion Catalysts & Technologies (Criterion) has achieved in its hydrotreating catalysts over the past 10 years play a key role in helping refiners worldwide to meet a range of performance goals. These include product yield and quality, feedstock flexibility, hydrogen consumption and environmental impact. During the last decade, these activity improvements were actually more than double those achieved over the previous two decades.

Because developments such as these have been fundamental to many refiners’ licence to operate and competitiveness, Impact spoke to John Smegal, Senior Staff Research Chemist, Hydroprocessing, Criterion Catalysts & Technologies, to find out how the organisation’s research and development capabilities have changed and whether it can continue to deliver year-on-year improvements.

“The improvements that were being made up to 1998 were rather gradual, but then there was a step change,” Smegal explains. “That is when we figured out a way to improve the intrinsic activity of the active sites on a catalyst. This was a hugely significant advance.”

Criterion capitalised on that innovation by enhancing the alumina supports and using promoters and additives to unlock additional improvements. In recent years, the organisation also has invested heavily in high-throughput experimentation equipment to improve fundamental understanding of catalysts and accelerate the discovery and development process to help refiners meet their increasingly demanding performance goals.

For example, one new piece of highthroughput equipment used for primary screening can test many catalysts in a short time. Those that do not show promise are eliminated straight away and the rest progress to the secondary screening phase. The traditional approach is to test one catalyst at a time, but Criterion is using high-throughput apparatus that features 16 miniature reactors, each of which can test a catalyst using real feedstocks and provide representative results.

“The great thing about being able to test a large number of catalysts is that you can evaluate a wide variety of approaches in a short period,” says Smegal. “In the past, because you had a limited number of reactors, you had to rely on scientific intuition and select the catalysts that you thought had the best chance of achieving your objectives. But high-throughput equipment enables us to get really creative and innovative and to look at a lot of things.”

Smegal is quick to add, however, that laboratory work is only one side of the coin. “What we do there has to be informed by real-life problems and situations,” he says. “We do not believe that you can develop a catalyst in isolation and have it be effective for a wide variety of refiners. So we work with customers, ask them about the particular units that are challenging to them, and arrange to have them send us their feedstocks. Then we use those in our highthroughput tools.

The result is a catalyst that is designed with our customers’ feedstocks and operating conditions in mind.”

Given all these advances, should we expect the magnitude of those performance improvements to begin to tail off? “That is a very good question,” says Smegal. “I have been working in catalyst development since 1985 and it does surprise me that these improvements have not somehow plateaued out. The challenges facing refiners, especially changing feedstock slates and product specifications, are increasingly challenging.

“Nevertheless, through the persistence and creativity of our scientists in technology centres around the world we are still finding ways to improve these catalysts. High-throughput experimentation, improved understanding of catalysis and a customer focus will enable us to continue developing new, fit-for-purpose catalysts very quickly. There is still much more to explore,” he concludes.

For more information, contact John Smegal.