Lanzhou Petrochemical Company Overhauls RFCCU

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Lanzhou Petrochemical Company (Lanzhou, Gansu Province), a subsidiary of China's oil giant China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), recently completed the overhaul of its 1.4 million-ton-per-annum (TPA) residue fluid catalytic cracking unit (RFCCU) and successfully put it into operation again.

Before the overhaul, there were problems in the RFCCU, such as the leaking of catalyzer. To ensure the company's annual crude oil processing goal of 10.50 million tons, Lanzhou Petrochemical decided to overhaul the unit, which had been seen as the bottleneck of the company's production.

The company, founded in 1950s, has a total asset of about $630 million and employs about 16,000 people. Its business covers chemical production, mechanical instrument manufacturing, project construction and foreign trade, among other things. With its prime operating income amounting to about $560 million, the company aims to increase the income to $820 million by 2010.

The RFCCU is used to process raw materials containing certain percentages of heavy oil, reducing the cost to produce quality petrochemical products like gasoline and diesel fuel. China started research on building the RFCCU in the 1970s and set up its first 1 million-TPA RFCCU in 1983 in Shijiazhuang in Hebei Province.

China's heavy oil resources are comparatively rich, with proven reserves amounting to 2.06 billion tons until the end of 2005. China's prognostic reserves of land heavy oil and asphalt are 19.8 billion tons; the prospective reserves of oil sands reach 6.14 tons; and the reserves of oil shale are about 1 trillion tons of which 32.2 billion have been proven and 982. 9 billion are prognostic.

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