ABSTRACT
Catalytic cracking is the most important and widely used refinery process for converting heavy oils into more valuable gasoline and lighter products, with 10.6 MMBPD (over 1 million tons/day) of oil processed in the world [29]. Originally cracking was accomplished thermally but the catalytic process has almost com-pletely replaced thermal cracking because more gasoline having a higher octane and less heavy fuel oils and light gases are produced [28]. The light gases pro-duced by catalytic cracking contain more olefins than those produced by thermal cracking (Table 6.1).
