Hydrocarbon Processing - September 2022 - 103

100th Anniversary
History of the HPI
LEE NICHOLS, VP, Content/Editor-in-Chief
The 1990s: Clean fuels and emissions mitigation,
M&A, GTL and the fieldbus wars
Much like several initiatives passed in
the 1970s and 1980s, the 1990s were a
decade heavily focused on environmental
issues, with many new regulations
being enacted to not only mitigate industrial
and vehicle emissions but also to advance
the production of clean fuels globally.
As a result, refiners spent billions of
dollars during the 1990s to install, modify,
upgrade and reconfigure process units
to adhere to new government regulations
[e.g., the establishment of the reformulated
gasoline program (Phases 1 and
2) in the U.S.].222
This trend is still progressing
today. Additional greenhouse
gas emissions reduction initiatives also
emerged from the Kyoto Protocol in the
late 1990s/early 2000s, a precursor to
the Paris Agreement in 2016. Both agreements
call upon nations to significantly
mitigate carbon emissions.
New clean-fuels regulations led to
additional refining capacity being built
during the 1990s to reduce sulfur levels
in transportation fuels. In conjunction
with new secondary unit capacity
builds, the refining industry increased
total net crude distillation capacity by
nearly 8 MMbpd, reaching more than 83
MMbpd by 2000.181
Although rocked by
an economic crisis in the late 1990s, the
Asia-Pacific region led refining capacity
additions, adding more than 8 MMbpd
(net) by 2000-China alone more than
doubled domestic refining capacity to
nearly 6 MMbpd within the decade.181
The 1990s also witnessed the increased
usage of metallocene catalysts.
Metallocene structures were first discovered
simultaneously in the 1950s
by Thomas Kealy and Peter Pauson at
Duquesne University (U.S.), and by a different
group comprised of Samuel Miller,
John Tebboth and John Tremaine at British
Oxygen (now part of Linde) in London,
England-these groups worked with
ferrocene, a type of metallocene.223, 224
A commercial use for metallocene
was discovered in the 1970s by German
chemist Walter Kaminsky while working
at the University of Hamburg (Germany).225
According
to literature, Kaminsky
discovered that using metallocene with
a methyl aluminoxane cocatalyst led to a
novel pathway for olefin polymerization.
This discovery led to many companies increasing
their research and development
budgets to produce new metallocene catalysts
for polymer production (e.g., polyethylenes,
polypropylenes, polystyrene).
Many companies introduced proprietary
metallocene catalysts in the 1990s, including
ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical,
BASF and Mitsui, among others.226
The 1990s also witnessed a surge in
high-profile mergers and acquisitions,
the advancement of gas-to-liquids (GTL)
technologies and capital-intensive GTL
plant builds, and the evolution of fieldbus
technologies and the standards that
govern them.
New fuel standards directives lead
to a decline in sulfur content. One
of the detrimental effects of modernizing
societies is an increase in air pollution.
Increased smog from fuel exhaust has
been a challenge in many cities around
the world for more than 70 yr. Many nations'
governments have enacted a host
of regulations and standards to combat
air pollution. For example, the U.S. began
to enact new air pollution laws in the
mid-1950s. These directives led to the
Clean Air Act and various amendments,
which gave more authoritative power to
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) to mitigate air pollution. These
acts/amendments also created federal
standards for vehicle emissions (the history
of the Clean Air Act and subsequent
amendments are detailed in the 1970s
history section).
The Clean Air Act of 1990 led to the
creation of tiered emissions standards
for vehicles in the U.S. The Tier 1 standard
was introduced in 1991 and phased
into the market between 1994 and 1997.
Tier 2 was adopted in 1999 and phasedin
from 2004-2009.227
The Tier 2 program
marked the first time the U.S. EPA
treated vehicles and fuels as a system.228
These standards applied to light-duty
vehicles (i.e., vehicles ≤ 8,500 lb) and
led to a significant decline in sulfur limits
in transportation fuels (gasoline and
diesel). Prior to these regulations, onroad
diesel fuel sulfur content was more
than 5,000 parts per million (ppm). To
adhere to new emissions standards put
forth in the Tier 1 program, new lowsulfur
diesel fuel was introduced into the
market in the early 1990s. This fuel met
the new sulfur limit specification of 500
ppm, significantly decreasing total sulfur
content in diesel fuel.229
The Tier 2 standard helped reduce
sulfur content in gasoline by up to 90%.
By early 2004, the corporate average gasoline
sulfur standard was 120 ppm, with
a cap of 300 ppm. This standard was reduced
to 30 ppm with an 80-ppm cap in
2006.230
The Tier 2 standard also reduced
sulfur content in diesel fuel to 15 ppm,
which became known as ultra-low-sulfur
diesel (ULSD). Subsequent regulations
would further decrease sulfur content
in fuels-the Tier 3 fuel regulation, adopted
in 2017 with implementation to
2025, further reduced sulfur content in
gasoline to 10 ppm.
In Europe, research by French and
German scientists into smog mitigation
in major cities in the mid-1950s led to
the origins of new emissions standards
Hydrocarbon Processing's Centennial Anniversary | SEPTEMBER 2022 103
Hydrocarbon Processing - September 2022

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