Propane and butane are typically separated from natural gas or crude oil in a fractionation plant or produced as a by-product in various refinery conversion units. Propane and butane are excellent feedstocks for ethylene plants, producing valuable products such as hydrogen, propylene and butadiene in addition to ethylene. Propane and butane can also be upgraded to hydrogen and propylene or hydrogen and butylene/butadiene via on-purpose dehydrogenation in a plant using Lummus Technology’s CATOFIN® and/or CATADIENE® technology.
The resulting olefins from the ethylene plant or CATOFIN/CATADIENE unit are valuable feedstocks to produce polyethylene, polypropylene, cumene, butadiene, high purity isobutylene, gasoline alkylate, MTBE, ETBE and other products. Our Olefins Conversion Technology combined with ethylene dimerization can interconvert ethylene, butylene and propylene to ensure proper product balance.
Similarly, there are numerous C4 olefins recovery and interconversion processes to increase value and produce target products, such as butene isomerization, butene dimerization, CD-DEIB® butene-2 recovery, CDIB® back-cracking for high purity isobutylene and CDAlky®/CDAlkyPlus® for gasoline alkylate.
