Coal chemical industry: from "tradition" to "modern"

In the past 70 years, China's coal chemical industry has developed from the traditional coal chemical industry with coke, synthetic ammonia and calcium carbide as its main products to the modern coal chemical industry with the world's first production scale and the world's leading level of some technical equipment At the beginning of its development, China's coal chemical industry mostly relies on imports of technical equipment In the aspect of traditional coal chemical industry, in 1949, China's coke output was only 525000 tons, and all the process equipment used depended on import It was not until 1958 that the first mechanized coke oven with independent intellectual property rights was built in China - the coking furnace of Beijing Coking Plant Subsequently, driven by the rapid development of iron and steel industry, China's coking industry has stepped into the fast lane of development It is also difficult to start the synthetic ammonia industry in China After the founding of the people's Republic of China, in order to meet the urgent needs of agricultural development, four synthetic ammonia plants were successively built in China in the 1950s After that, scientific and technological personnel creatively completed the general design of the "three catalyst" process of synthetic ammonia of 50000 tons / year, and built a plant of 50000-50000 tons / year synthetic ammonia co production of ammonium bicarbonate covering most counties From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, more than a dozen large-scale modern ammonia plants were introduced from abroad, ending the era of fixed bed intermittent coal gasification technology dominating China's ammonia industry As a typical representative of traditional coal chemical industry, China's calcium carbide industry is also developed on the basis of the old open calcium carbide furnace provided by the former Soviet Union High energy consumption, heavy pollution and difficult to recycle tail gas once became the synonym of calcium carbide industry In order to solve this problem, in the 1970s and 1980s, China successively introduced 35000 KVA, 25500 KVA sealed calcium carbide furnace and large ferroalloy furnace technology, and finally independently developed the manufacturing technology of large calcium carbide furnace, providing strong technical support for clean production of calcium carbide industry After the introduction, digestion, absorption, improvement and re innovation, the level of traditional coal chemical technology and equipment in China has been significantly improved Driven by the strong growth of domestic demand, traditional coal chemical industry has stepped into the fast lane of sustained growth, and the production scale of coke, synthetic ammonia and calcium carbide ranks first in the world At the same time of the rapid development of traditional coal chemical industry, with the rapid development of petrochemical industry, global oil shortage appears, and coal, as the dominant energy in China, has been given a new mission, that is to use it as raw material to produce olefins, aromatics, glycol and other chemical products as well as oil products, natural gas and other energy products with the help of advanced technology, so modern coal chemical industry has entered the public vision 。 In the mid-1990s, China proposed to vigorously develop clean coal technology, and identified four major areas and ten key directions, opening up a new era of leapfrog development of modern coal chemical industry in China Since then, China's modern coal chemical industry has embarked on the track of sustained and rapid development After many years of scientific and technological research and accumulation, especially through the project demonstration and promotion since the 11th five year plan, China's modern coal chemical industry has made breakthroughs in key technology research, independent development of major equipment, product variety development and production scale expansion, and won wide attention and high praise at home and abroad Advanced coal gasification technology is in full bloom In recent years, China has developed a number of advanced coal gasification technologies, such as multi nozzle opposed coal water slurry gasification, aerospace pulverized coal pressurized gasification, Tsinghua water wall coal water slurry gasification, Se pulverized coal gasification, two-stage dry pulverized coal pressurized gasification At present, there are also some new coal gasification technologies under development, such as the large-scale transport bed gasification technology of Yanchang Petroleum Group, catalytic gasification, hydrogenation gasification, underground gasification and other directional gasification technologies of Xinao group Major breakthroughs have been made in key technologies The core technologies such as coal direct liquefaction process and catalyst developed by Shenhua Group have been successfully applied to the demonstration project of million ton coal to oil project; the new generation of high temperature slurry bed Fischer Tropsch synthesis coal indirect liquefaction process and catalyst technology developed by Shanxi Coal Chemistry Research Institute of Chinese Academy of sciences have been successfully applied to the demonstration projects of indirect coal to oil projects such as Yitai, Lu'an and Shenhua; Yankuang Group has built Yulin million ton indirect coal to oil demonstration project by adopting its own developed low-temperature Fischer Tropsch synthetic oil technology, and recently the international leading high-temperature Fischer Tropsch synthetic technology has also passed the appraisal; the methanol to low-carbon olefin (DMTO) process technology developed by Dalian Institute of chemical industry, Chinese Academy of Sciences and other units has been completed and put into production with multiple sets of industrial devices The demonstration project has achieved significant results Shenhua Baotou coal to olefin project, Yitai 160000t / a indirect coal liquefaction project and other demonstration units have been in stable operation for many years, but also achieved good economic benefits For example, the trial operation of China Coal Yulin coal to olefin project was put into operation in June 2014, with sales revenue of 1.49 billion yuan and trial operation revenue of 400 million yuan Great progress has been made in the park construction Domestic modern coal chemical projects are mainly concentrated in Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi, Ningxia, Shanxi, Xinjiang and other places, and the industrial development pattern of park and base is preliminarily formed At present, the coal chemical industry bases with scale are mainly Ordos coal chemical industry base in Inner Mongolia, Ningdong energy chemical industry base in Ningxia, Yuheng coal chemical industry base in Shaanxi, Zhundong, Ili, Tuha, Hefeng coal chemical industry bases in Xinjiang Most of the modern coal chemical industry bases include coal mining, modern coal chemical industry and other upstream and downstream related industries, and some of them have realized multi joint production with petrochemical, electric power and other industries Today, we can be proud to say that in addition to coal to natural gas, China's technology and industrialization level of coal to olefin, coal to oil, coal to aromatics and coal to glycol are all leading the world in an all-round way, and China has reached the highest point in the world in the field of modern coal chemical industry.