PetroChina Achieves Breakthroughs in Commercial Test of Hexene-1 Package Technology

The commercial test of package technology for manufacturing 20 kt/a of hexane-1 independently developed by the PetroChina Petrochemical Research Institute has attained its staged achievement. The 20 kt/a hexane-1 unit at the Dushanzi Petrochemical Company (DPC) since its startup in July has been continuously and smoothly operating for 100 days, while delivering more than three thousand tons of hexane-1 with a purity of higher than 99.5%. Currently DPC by using its self-made hexane-1 as comonomer in its three LLDPE and HDPE production lines has cumulatively delivered a spate of high-add-value PE products amounting to 110 thousand tons. Since at present there is a surging market demand for high-quality hexene-1, this unit after having finished its preliminary calibration tests by the end of August 2015 has been switched to its commercial production phase, symbolizing the PetroChina’s breakthrough in the phase of testing the hexane-1 package technology in commercial scale.

The calibration tests have shown that in comparison with the 5 kt/a hexene-1 unit, the 20 kt/a hexene-1 unit at DPC has achieved an energy reduction of 28%, a unit feedstock consumption of 2%, and a product purity increase of 0.4%, demonstrating signi fi cant improvements in all operating indicators.