(96f) How CRE Has Shaped and Continues to Revolutionize the Multi-Trillion Dollar Energy and Petrochemicals Industry.

From the early days of the chemical reaction engineering discipline, some 60 years ago, it has materially impacted the production of fuels and petrochemicals in an ever growing industry, immediately generating early versions of what is now known as a digital twin. Over the last 25 years in particular, our profession has enabled remarkable advances in this field. The 90’s saw the use of techniques like structure oriented lumping, single event kinetics and alike, enabling a more systematic understanding of the composition and conversion of hydrocarbons. Advanced characterization techniques, coupled with computational chemistry lead to much more fundamental understanding of hydroprocessing catalysis, with remarkable acceleration of the clean fuels technology space. In the early 2000’s, as the fluidized bed became a more targeted conversion unit for fuels as well as petrochemicals, the advances in CFD, radioactive particle tracking and new computational techniques using GRUs, enabled a much more detailed understanding of residence time distributions of solid and gas and have markedly increased the applicability and efficiency of this technology. Some 15 years ago, the shift towards non-fossil feedstocks provided a new set of challenges, with even higher feedstock complexity and a new set of reaction classes to tune and optimize. And finally, with today’s shift to a hydrogen based energy infrastructure, our field is taking an increasing interest in the electrochemistry space, with flow field modeling, and optimization of the mass transfer and kinetics at the electrode interface.

In this paper, we will review the overall timeline of the above mentioned CRE advances and provide a quick deeper dive into how they have impacted and continue to impact key technologies in refining and petrochemicals. Throughout all of these technology revolutions, our CRE division has continuously morphed and has managed to maintain its relevance and leadership for the profession.