Enlarged Scale of Domestic Syngas-to-EG Unit

The Shanghai Wuzheng Engineering Technology Limited Liability Company in collaboration with China Huanqiu Contracting and Engineering Corporation will provide the technology and project design to the commercial and engineering scale-up project for manufacture of ethylene glycol (EG) from syngas launched by the Zhejiang Rongsheng Holding Group Company. Currently the project design activity is being carried out successfully.

It is learned that this project will adopt the upgraded catalyst and novel plate reactor, with the production capacity of a single reactor reaching 200 kt/a. The enlargement of a single EG reactor can reduce the consumption of major materials by 5% and the consumption of energy by over 10%, with the qualified rate of polyester grade EG exceeding 95%.

The carbonylation reactor and hydrotreating reactor comprising the commercial single series 200 kt/a—300 kt/a EG production technology are all made of plate reactors which can save the equipment investment cost by more than 25% as compared to that of the connected in parallel multiple tubular reactors having the same throughput. The enlarged size of equipment can avoid the bias flow in reaction materials and temperature fluctuations during temperature rise which is characteristic of the connected in parallel multiple tubular reactors along with setbacks such as the worsening catalyst selectivity and low rate of qualified polyester grade EG product.

The adoption of novel plate-type reactors can reduce compression energy consumption by over 20% and the investment in the associated system as compared to those of the connected in parallel multiple tubular reactors with the same production scale. The macroporous zeolite can be used as the catalyst in the novel plate reactors and its EG selectivity and hourly space yield can be significantly increased after addition of the promoter. In order to abate poisoning and inactivation of the catalyst the Shanghai Wuzheng Engineering Technology Limited Liability Company has innovatively introduced the prehydrotreating catalyst that can extend the service life of hydrotreating catalyst to two years. In the meantime, the adoption of an on-line mass spectrometer can help to solve the tough problem for quality control, because a mass spectrometer can concurrently monitor and measure multiple gas streams at the ppb level. The tail gases, waste liquids and waste solids are recycled in order to reduce the material and energy consumption.