Hydrodesulfurization

Hydrodesulfurization (HDS), also called hydrotreatment or hydrotreating, is a catalytic chemical process widely used to remove sulfur (S) from natural gas and from refined petroleum products, such as gasoline or petrol, jet fuel, kerosene, diesel fuel, and fuel oils. The purpose of removing the sulfur, and creating products such as ultra-low-sulfur diesel, is to reduce the sulfur dioxide () emissions that result from using those fuels in automotive vehicles, aircraft, railroad locomotives, ships, gas or oil burning power plants, residential and industrial furnaces, and other forms of fuel combustion. Another important reason for removing sulfur from the naphtha streams within a petroleum refinery is that sulfur, even in extremely low concentrations, poisons the noble metal catalysts (platinum and rhenium) in the catalytic reforming units that are subsequently used to upgrade the octane rating of the naphtha streams. The industrial hydrodesulfurization processes include facilities for the capture and removal of the resulting hydrogen sulfide () gas. In petroleum refineries, the hydrogen sulfide gas is then subsequently converted into byproduct, sulfur (S) or sulfuric acid (). In fact, the vast majority of the 64,000,000 metric tons of sulfur produced worldwide in 2005 was byproduct sulfur from refineries and other hydrocarbon processing plants. An HDS unit in the petroleum refining industry is also often referred to as a hydrotreater. Although some reactions involving catalytic hydrogenation of organic substances were already known, the property of finely divided nickel to catalyze the fixation of hydrogen on hydrocarbon (ethylene, benzene) double bonds was discovered by the French chemist Paul Sabatier in 1897. Through this work, he found that unsaturated hydrocarbons in the vapor phase could be converted into saturated hydrocarbons by using hydrogen and a catalytic metal, laying the foundation of the modern catalytic hydrogenation process.