Synergistic Process for Coker Gas Oil Catalytic Cracking and Gasoline Reformation

The most critical problem of processing coker gas oil (CGO) is its high nitrogen content, especially the basic nitrogen compounds, which limits its cracking performance in the fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) process. For enhancing the conversion of CGO, three processing schemes were evaluated in a pilot-scale riser FCC unit. Four indexes (thermal cracking index, dehydrogenation index, hydrogen transfer coefficient, and isomerization reaction index) were used to investigate the effects of operating conditions on the reactions of CGO cracking. Results show that the optimal operating conditions for CGO cracking are high reaction temperature and large catalyst-to-oil ratio with a short residence time. Therefore, we proposed a synergistic process by selectively recycling light FCC gasoline (LCG) from the upper position of the riser reactor, which can provide a high-severity reaction zone for CGO cracking and a low-severity reaction zone for gasoline upgrading. To further investigate the mutual effect of the two feeds, different recycle ratios of LCG were tested. Results indicate that the conversion of CGO significantly increased with the LCG recycle ratio. When the recycle ratio reached 50 wt %, the gasoline could be upgraded at a higher efficiency. To ensure the optimal recycle ratio and improve the gasoline quality, a two-stage synergistic (TSS) process was proposed. The simulated experiments of the TSS process show that the higher conversion and more desired products can be achieved, even though under a high processing ratio of CGO to conventional feeds