Catalysis 2025 Issue

advanced catalyst formulations that enable the production of olefins from renewable feedstocks can provide a com - petitive edge. Benefit: Investments in these catalysts not only improve economic outcomes but also align with corporate sustain - ability goals, enhancing their attractiveness to investors. In summary, advanced catalyst formulations and techni- cal support play critical roles in enhancing the efficiency, yield, and sustainability of processes such as olefin sepa - ration. By addressing issues such as selectivity, catalyst stability, and process integration, these advancements can significantly benefit investment decisions and overall operational performance. A Wolf Spaether, Head of Strategic Marketing & Product Development Ethylene, Clariant, wolf.spaether@ clariant.com The complexity of large-scale olefin product separation correlates with the compositional complexity of the product raw stream mixtures. Well-established fractionation tech - nologies will quantitatively separate the different ‘C-cuts’ (C1, C2, C3, C4 ) due to their distinctively different molecular weights. However, olefinic mixtures, dependent on their source (such as steam crackers, refineries, FCC, and deep cata - lytic cracking), typically contain additional impurities and poisons such as acetylenes, organic sulphur species, phos- phines, and various heavy metals that cannot easily be removed by means of fractionated distillation. It is, how - ever, imperative to remove those impurities and poisons to render the olefin product usable for further downstream conversion, such as polyethylene, polypropylene, and other base chemical processes. In a conventional configuration, the contaminated feed streams would be passed over several adsorbents to indi - vidually remove heavy metals, sulphur, and phosphines, followed by selective hydrogenation catalysts to convert acetylenes into their corresponding olefins. This would require capital-intensive flow sheets and cause undesired operational complexity. Advanced catalyst formulations should be able to con- duct the clean-up over significantly fewer steps, even down to a one-reactor single-pass operation. A good example is Clariant’s OleMax 101 catalyst series, which simultane - ously cleans refinery offgas from oxygen, nitrous oxides, acetylenes, and heavy metals contamination in a single reactor design. The purified olefinic mixture can be com - bined with other olefin streams or directly processed in a downstream olefin recovery section. The employed capital could be significantly reduced in comparison to a conven - tional multi-reactor design. Support should be provided beginning with the design phase, catalyst loading, start-up, and continued operation, as well as state-of-the-art digital data collection and analy - sis. Against this backdrop, a team of experienced global experts supports our clients during the entire life cycle of the catalyst, including regeneration to facilitate maximum on-stream availability.

SPECIALTY CATALYSTS & ADSORBENTS SINCE 1966

Unbeatable Range of Products

World-Class Technical Support

Stringent Quality Control & Quality Assurance

Global Manufacturing with Local Supply

Delivering what you need, when and where you need it.

Catalyst Support Balls

Catalyst Recycling

Top Bed Grading

Catalysts & Adsorbents

Purification Catalysts

+1 (323) 254-3600 sales@mchemical.com