#Clean Fuels

[chemicalmarketwatch-sp]

Refinery Catalyst Market: Driving Efficiency, Sustainability, and Growth in Energy and Industry

In the rapidly evolving energy landscape, refinery catalysts are critical to refining crude oil into high-quality products such as gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. Beyond efficiency, they help refineries meet stricter environmental standards and reduce operational costs. As global energy demands rise and regulations tighten, the refinery catalyst market continues to innovate, creating opportunities for sectors such as oil & gas, automotive, and environmental industries.

Market Overview

The refinery catalyst market is experiencing steady growth, fueled by a heightened focus on sustainability, operational efficiency, and regulatory compliance. The global refinery catalyst market is valued at USD 5.6 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach USD 6.8 billion by 2029, growing at 4.0% cagr from 2024 to 2029. The key categories of catalysts include:

FCC (Fluid Catalytic Cracking) Catalysts: Widely used to break heavy hydrocarbons into lighter, more valuable products like gasoline and propylene.

Hydrotreating Catalysts: Remove impurities such as sulfur and nitrogen, ensuring fuel meets ultra-low sulfur standards.

Hydrocracking Catalysts: Convert heavy hydrocarbons into cleaner fuels, such as kerosene and diesel.

Catalytic Reforming Catalysts: Increase the octane rating of fuels, meeting the performance needs of modern engines.

Key Drivers of Growth

1. Increasing Energy Demand

As developing economies grow, their energy consumption surges, creating a higher demand for refined products. Refinery catalysts enable refiners to maximize output and quality, making them essential tools in addressing this demand.

2. Stricter Environmental Standards

Governments worldwide are implementing more rigorous emission standards, such as Euro 6 and IMO 2020 low-sulfur marine fuel regulations. Advanced hydrotreating and hydrocracking catalysts help refineries produce cleaner fuels to comply with these mandates, particularly for automotive and shipping industries.

3. Petrochemical Industry Growth

Beyond fuel, catalysts are integral to producing petrochemicals like ethylene and propylene, which are foundational to plastics, textiles, and specialty chemicals. As these industries expand, so does the need for advanced catalytic processes.

4. Technological Innovations

The introduction of nano-based catalysts and other high-performance technologies has revolutionized the market. These advancements provide greater efficiency, selectivity, and durability, reducing waste and boosting refinery productivity.

Challenges in the Market

While opportunities abound, the market faces certain hurdles:

Oil Price Volatility: Fluctuating crude oil prices impact refinery investments in catalyst upgrades.

Renewable Energy Transition: The global shift towards renewable energy sources is influencing fossil fuel dependency.

Spent Catalyst Disposal: Recycling spent catalysts, which often contain hazardous materials, remains a complex and costly process.

Emerging Trends

1. Cleaner Fuel Production

The focus on reducing carbon footprints has led to innovations in catalysts for ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD) and high-octane gasoline production. These are crucial for reducing emissions in the automotive sector.

2. AI Integration in Refineries

Artificial intelligence is optimizing catalyst usage and refinery operations by predicting wear, improving process efficiency, and minimizing downtime.

3. Circular Economy Practices

Catalyst manufacturers are increasingly recycling spent catalysts to recover valuable metals like platinum and palladium. These practices lower costs and align with sustainability goals.

4. Regional Dynamics

Asia-Pacific: Rapid industrialization and new refinery projects in India, China, and Southeast Asia drive significant demand.

North America: The rise of shale gas and tight oil production supports advanced catalytic processes.

Middle East & Africa: Investments in large-scale refineries and petrochemical complexes are expanding market opportunities.

Applications Across Industries

Oil & Gas: Refinery catalysts are indispensable for producing cleaner, high-quality fuels.

Automotive: The shift towards cleaner transportation fuels ties directly to the automotive industry's sustainability goals.

Catalyst Manufacturing: The demand for specialized, high-performance catalysts fosters innovation in production techniques.

Environmental Sector: Catalysts help minimize industrial emissions, contributing to global efforts to combat climate change.

Download PDF Brochure : 

The refinery catalyst market serves as a cornerstone for industries striving for efficiency and sustainability. With innovations in catalytic technologies and growing adoption of eco-friendly practices, the market is not only addressing current energy challenges but also shaping a more sustainable future. For decision-makers in oil & gas, automotive, energy, and environmental industries, embracing advancements in refinery catalysts can unlock new growth opportunities and align operations with global environmental goals.

As the demand for cleaner fuels and petrochemicals grows, refinery catalysts will continue to lead the way in delivering superior performance, reduced emissions, and enhanced productivity—an essential step toward a greener tomorrow.

[faultfalha]

The vast majority of the world is unaware of the true cost of clean marine fuels. It's an industry built on a carefully constructed illusion, one that most people never see past. But I know the dirty facts, because I'm the one who's been cleaning up their messes for years. There's a reason the big oil companies are so interested in renewables, and it's not because they care about the environment. It's because they know that the sooner renewables become mainstream, the sooner the dirty truth about clean marine fuels will be exposed. It's a sham, a way to clean up their image and make a quick buck. But I'm not going to let them get away with it. I'm going to blow the whistle on their dirty little secret.

[reasonsforhope]

"It is 70 years since AT&T’s Bell Labs unveiled a new technology for turning sunlight into power. The phone company hoped it could replace the batteries that run equipment in out-of-the-way places. It also realised that powering devices with light alone showed how science could make the future seem wonderful; hence a press event at which sunshine kept a toy Ferris wheel spinning round and round.

Today solar power is long past the toy phase. Panels now occupy an area around half that of Wales, and this year they will provide the world with about 6% of its electricity—which is almost three times as much electrical energy as America consumed back in 1954. Yet this historic growth is only the second-most-remarkable thing about the rise of solar power. The most remarkable is that it is nowhere near over.

To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.

Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.

To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.

As our essay this week explains, solar power faces no such constraint. The resources needed to produce solar cells and plant them on solar farms are silicon-rich sand, sunny places and human ingenuity, all three of which are abundant. Making cells also takes energy, but solar power is fast making that abundant, too. As for demand, it is both huge and elastic—if you make electricity cheaper, people will find uses for it. The result is that, in contrast to earlier energy sources, solar power has routinely become cheaper and will continue to do so.

Other constraints do exist. Given people’s proclivity for living outside daylight hours, solar power needs to be complemented with storage and supplemented by other technologies. Heavy industry and aviation and freight have been hard to electrify. Fortunately, these problems may be solved as batteries and fuels created by electrolysis gradually become cheaper...

The aim should be for the virtuous circle of solar-power production to turn as fast as possible. That is because it offers the prize of cheaper energy. The benefits start with a boost to productivity. Anything that people use energy for today will cost less—and that includes pretty much everything. Then come the things cheap energy will make possible. People who could never afford to will start lighting their houses or driving a car. Cheap energy can purify water, and even desalinate it. It can drive the hungry machinery of artificial intelligence. It can make billions of homes and offices more bearable in summers that will, for decades to come, be getting hotter.

But it is the things that nobody has yet thought of that will be most consequential. In its radical abundance, cheaper energy will free the imagination, setting tiny Ferris wheels of the mind spinning with excitement and new possibilities.

This week marks the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere. The Sun rising to its highest point in the sky will in decades to come shine down on a world where nobody need go without the blessings of electricity and where the access to energy invigorates all those it touches."

-via The Economist, June 20, 2024

[politijohn]

Source

[hope-for-the-planet]

From the article:

Scientists analyzed coal ash from power plants across the United States and found it could contain up to 11 million tons of rare earth elements — nearly eight times the amount the US has in domestic reserves — worth around $8.4 billion, according to recent research led by the University of Texas at Austin. It offers a huge potential source of domestic rare earth elements without the need for new mining, said Bridget Scanlon, a study author and research professor at UT’s Jackson School of Geosciences. “This really exemplifies the ‘trash to treasure’ mantra,” she said. “We’re basically trying to close the cycle and use waste and recover resources in the waste.”

[satans-knitwear]

Front and back ✨

Treat me ~ Tip Me ~ More of me

[dinosaursforfossilfuels]

Another day of being out here in Albany buying up as many politicians as we can-- It's just good business when you are in the business of Fossil Fuels.

We do Gaslighting, we do Greenwashing, and we delay planet-saving climate action.

Dinosaurs 4 Fossil Fuels! Extinction 4 All! FOLLOW US EVERYWHERE: Tiktok Insta Twitter D4FF.org

[quinn-of-aebradore]

I keep thinking about how Ashton’s been acting lately and I coming back to them saying that they’ve earned “a minor sense of superiority” for all they’ve been through in their life and then how through a lot of what they said after that demonstrates that that sense of superiority goes far beyond being minor. Especially the way they laughed and said “who else?” when the Hells asked themselves if they should really be the ones deciding if the balance of the world should be upended and remade. It carried a lot less of a “well who else is going to do it?” energy that I think it might’ve once carried, the sort of thing the Nein might say, and instead felt more like a “you really want anyone else but us choosing that?”, which aligns with the wildly out-of-hand way they were behaving in the council meeting. They really seem to be placing themself above everyone that was in that council room, especially with how they repeatedly said that all of those delegates are stupid and blind and so on, particularly those who answer to divine powers (I cannot remember if Ashton directly said that last night, but I feel like it would align with what they did say even if they didn’t put it that clearly).

What makes that very interesting to me is that Ashton is also a vessel for a higher power now, a power that—from the way they seem to be looking at things—is grander and older and more powerful than the gods themselves; a titan. They may not answer to Rau’shan, but they channel her power just as surely as any cleric or paladin might channel their deity’s powers. Which is a little hypocritical, but that’s not my point.

I keep wondering that if maybe, probably on a subconscious level, that connection to an older power than the gods is fueling Ashton’s sense of superiority over the gods and those who follow them.

[windydrawallday]

Forehead Kiss

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

"While the collapse of the AMOC was once considered “low probability,” the likelihood of it happening is increasing. In fact, it’s becoming so concerning to oceanographers that 44 of them, from various countries, wrote and published a call to action, warning that the risk of the AMOC reaching a disastrous tipping point is “greatly underestimated” and will have “devastating and irreversible impacts.”

[cognitivejustice]

"Rapid deployment of clean energy technologies is also increasingly displacing oil in transport and power generation, adding downward pressure to otherwise weak demand drivers,"

World faces oil surplus in 2025 on weak demand, IEA says

Oil demand growth has been weaker than expected this year in large part because of China. After driving rises in oil consumption for years, economic challenges and a shift towards electric vehicles are tempering oil growth prospects in the world's second-largest consumer.

[sourscratched]

bunch of screenshots from the off book livestream, shoutout shoutout to everyone who was in the chat 🌋🪽🌴

[reasonsforhope]

"A 1-megawatt sand battery that can store up to 100 megawatt hours of thermal energy will be 10 times larger than a prototype already in use.

The new sand battery will eliminate the need for oil-based energy consumption for the entire town of town of Pornainen, Finland.

Sand gets charged with clean electricity and stored for use within a local grid.

Finland is doing sand batteries big. Polar Night Energy already showed off an early commercialized version of a sand battery in Kankaanpää in 2022, but a new sand battery 10 times that size is about to fully rid the town of Pornainen, Finland of its need for oil-based energy.

In cooperation with the local Finnish district heating company Loviisan Lämpö, Polar Night Energy will develop a 1-megawatt sand battery capable of storing up to 100 megawatt hours of thermal energy.

“With the sand battery,” Mikko Paajanen, CEO of Loviisan Lämpö, said in a statement, “we can significantly reduce energy produced by combustion and completely eliminate the use of oil.”

Polar Night Energy introduced the first commercial sand battery in 2022, with local energy utility Vatajankoski. “Its main purpose is to work as a high-power and high-capacity reservoir for excess wind and solar energy,” Markku Ylönen, Polar Nigh Energy’s co-founder and CTO, said in a statement at the time. “The energy is stored as heat, which can be used to heat homes, or to provide hot steam and high temperature process heat to industries that are often fossil-fuel dependent.” ...

Sand—a high-density, low-cost material that the construction industry discards [Note: 6/13/24: Turns out that's not true! See note at the bottom for more info.] —is a solid material that can heat to well above the boiling point of water and can store several times the amount of energy of a water tank. While sand doesn’t store electricity, it stores energy in the form of heat. To mine the heat, cool air blows through pipes, heating up as it passes through the unit. It can then be used to convert water into steam or heat water in an air-to-water heat exchanger. The heat can also be converted back to electricity, albeit with electricity losses, through the use of a turbine.

In Pornainen, Paajanen believes that—just by switching to a sand battery—the town can achieve a nearly 70 percent reduction in emissions from the district heating network and keep about 160 tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere annually. In addition to eliminating the usage of oil, they expect to decrease woodchip combustion by about 60 percent.

The sand battery will arrive ready for use, about 42 feet tall and 49 feet wide. The new project’s thermal storage medium is largely comprised of soapstone, a byproduct of Tulikivi’s production of heat-retaining fireplaces. It should take about 13 months to get the new project online, but once it’s up and running, the Pornainen battery will provide thermal energy storage capacity capable of meeting almost one month of summer heat demand and one week of winter heat demand without recharging.

“We want to enable the growth of renewable energy,” Paajanen said. “The sand battery is designed to participate in all Fingrid’s reserve and balancing power markets. It helps to keep the electricity grid balanced as the share of wind and solar energy in the grid increases.”"

-via Popular Mechanics, March 13, 2024

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Note: I've been keeping an eye on sand batteries for a while, and this is really exciting to see. We need alternatives to lithium batteries ASAP, due to the grave human rights abuses and environmental damage caused by lithium mining, and sand batteries look like a really good solution for grid-scale energy storage.

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Note 6/13/24: Unfortunately, turns out there are substantial issues with sand batteries as well, due to sand scarcity. More details from a lovely asker here, sources on sand scarcity being a thing at the links: x, x, x, x, x

[vyvansecrashing]

can russia and north korea just nuke us already this is hopeless