ABSTRACT
The fluid catalytic cracking process, using vacuum gas oil as the feedstock, was introduced into refineries in the 1930s. In recent years, because of a trend toward the use of lowboiling products, most refineries perform the operation by partially blending residua into vacuum gas oil. However, conventional fluid catalytic cracking processes have limits in residuum processing, so residuum fluid catalytic cracking processes have lately been employed one after another. Because the residuum fluid catalytic cracking process enables efficient gasoline production directly from residua, it will play the most important role as a residuum cracking process, along with a residuum hydrotreating process (Table 18.9; Fig. 18.12) (Reynolds et al., 1992).
