New Catalytic Materials for Meeting the Challenge of Clean Gasoline & Diesel Fuel Production

New catalytic materials, which may bring important improvement or technical breakthrough to the petroleum refining technology for producing reformulated gasoline and low sulfur and aromatics diesel fuel, are discussed. For the purpose of producing high octane number gasoline and light olefins for etherification and alkylation processes, major improvements are achieved by the use of high reactivity-stability MFI type ZRP and low cost beta zeolites. A solid P-W heteropolyacid supported on SiO2 for replacing currently used HF and H2SO4 in alkylation process of isobutane with butenes, is under the pilot trial. For the production of low sulfur and aromatics diesel fuel, high surface area supported metallic nitrides are under extensive studies.