In the past years, there has been a rapid capacity growth in China’s hydrocracking units accounting for a significant share of Asia’s total capacity. In that context, in order to support troubleshooting refinery operations and enhance their hydrocracking catalyst technology, SINOPEC is continuously acquiring the most advanced and suited catalyst testing technologies. This 16-fold unit is designed to address the parallel testing and benchmarking of hydrotreating residue, a challenging application due to feedstock properties, at the heart of the refinery process. hte has developed an extensive experience in successfully overcoming such challenges through the findings of its contract research activities, underscored by the supply of similar technology solutions worldwide. The unit acquired by SINOPEC DRIPP constitutes a customized turnkey solution fitted with a powerful software package with the integration of online as well as offline data enabling an efficient data management and swift reporting.

Dr. Jiang leading the project at Dalian RIPP stated: "We chose to implement hte’s technology based on their track record in providing a high value proposition. The purchase of the unit allows the development of hydroprocessing residue catalysts under industrially relevant conditions, which is our main goal. The indicators we particularly valued were unit reliability, long-term stable operation, costs, safety, and good after-sales service."

Wolfram Stichert, CEO at hte comments: "We are truly elated by the deployment of hte’s state-of-the-art technology at SINOPEC DRIPP. The trust placed by SINOPEC in our high throughput technology is the result of a collaboration, which started more than a decade ago with the installation of one of our very first high throughput units at a customer’s site. I would like to express hte’s gratitude for SINOPEC audacious’ decision at the time and continued interest over the years."