Hydrodesulfurization - History

History

Although some reactions involving catalytic hydrogenation of organic substances were already known, the property of finely divided nickel to catalyze the fixation of hydrogen on hydrocarbon (ethylene, benzene) double bonds was discovered by the French chemist Paul Sabatier in 1897. Through this work, he found that unsaturated hydrocarbons in the vapor phase could be converted into saturated hydrocarbons by using hydrogen and a catalytic metal, laying the foundation of the modern catalytic hydrogenation process.

Soon after Sabatier's work, a German chemist, Wilhelm Normann, found that catalytic hydrogenation could be used to convert unsaturated fatty acids or glycerides in the liquid phase into saturated ones. He was awarded a patent in Germany in 1902 and in Britain in 1903, which was the beginning of what is now a worldwide industry.

In the mid-1950s, the first noble metal catalytic reforming process (the Platformer process) was commercialized. At the same time, the catalytic hydrodesulfurization of the naphtha feed to such reformers was also commercialized. In the decades that followed, various proprietary catalytic hydrodesulfurization processes, such as the one depicted in the flow diagram below, have been commercialized. Currently, virtually all of the petroleum refineries worldwide have one or more HDS units.

By 2006, miniature microfluidic HDS units had been implemented for treating JP-8 jet fuel to produce clean feed stock for a fuel cell hydrogen reformer. By 2007, this had been integrated into an operating 5 kW fuel cell generation system.