Hydrocracking catalysts for vacuum gas oil and de-metallized oil blend

At present, the objective of Hydrocracking is to convert medium and heavy vacuum gas oil (VGO) and possibly deasphalted oil (DAO) or demetallized oil (DMO) into gasoline lines, jet fuels and diesel oils according to geographical and seasonal variations in demand. In some specific cases one can try to get Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) and lubricating bases. The challenges that are posed on refiners are to employ the most suitable catalyst system that is capable of handling large hydrocarbon molecules and heavy poly-aromatic molecules. That certainly necessitates having large pores catalyst that can accommodate these large molecules and perform the desired reactions. As a result, various catalyst types were prepared throughout this work, at the same Nickel-Molybdenum metals loadings and zeolite to alumina binder compositions. This is an attempt to spot the appropriate catalyst support that can process VGO/DMO feed blend. The nature of the VGO/DMO is the real challenge in this work since not many people has done research in this area. From the literature survey, many scientists have only attempted to study catalysts performance using VGO feed not VGO/DMO feed blend, since DMO oil is only produced in very few refineries in the world one of them is in Riyadh Refinery at the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.