Benzene, toluene and mixed xylenes by solvent extraction of catalytic reformate

Sourced conceptual inventory per tonne of benzene, toluene and mixed xylenes together, with raffinate and C9+ aromatics as co-products: a typical reformate slate (US DOE 2000) and midpoints of the EU LVOC BREF utility ranges for BTX extraction units. No flowsheet; not reviewed.

Calculation maturity: not assessedDesign maturity: Concept (research)Not independently reviewedAromaticsReport a problem with this process
Research outputNot engineering advice and not an approved design: do not use it for construction, operation or safety decisions. What this means

Sourced conceptual inventory per tonne of benzene, toluene and mixed xylenes together, with raffinate and C9+ aromatics as co-products: a typical reformate slate (US DOE 2000) and midpoints of the EU LVOC BREF utility ranges for BTX extraction units. No flowsheet; not reviewed.

Capacity
per tonne of benzene, toluene and mixed xylenes together (the dataset's basis); no plant size

What goes in and out

In

  • ReformateFeedstockdebutanised C5+ reformate; linked to catalytic-reforming-1 (stabilised C5+ CCR reformate) in lca/mappings.yaml, whose pseudo-formula composition differs from the DOE slate this dataset uses
  • WaterFeedstockASSUMED equal to the water drained

Out

Utilities: Electricity, Steam (counted as heat delivered, gross of heat recovery)

Show in the process graph

Life cycle assessment

No footprint assessed yet; the process is part of the life-cycle inventory below.

In the open LCI database (cheme-as-code-atlas-preview-a3c52e4) as Benzene, 99.8 % or more Preliminary; Toluene Preliminary; Mixed xylenes (with ethylbenzene) Preliminary; Raffinate of aromatics extraction, Raffinate: non-aromatics with the unrecovered aromatics, to gasoline blending or steam cracking Preliminary; C9+ aromatics (heavy aromatics cut), C9+ aromatics (heavy cut), to gasoline blending Preliminary.

Download it for Brightway, openLCA and other tools.

In the LCI database: system model, datasets and KPIs against the benchmarks

In the LCI database

Status
Preliminary 3 unmapped exchanges. Some exchanges have no background mapping yet: they are exported unlinked and count no burden, so the inventory is incomplete.
System model
attributional, cut-off (methodology 1.1.0)
Allocation
mass (deviation, from dataset) · product:benzene 8.5 %, product:c9-aromatics 13.4 %, product:raffinate 26.4 %, product:toluene 26.2 %, product:xylenes 25.6 %
Allocation findings
none
Change report
Not available: this build has no change report against an earlier release.
Dataset pages
Benzene, 99.8 % or more Preliminary · C9+ aromatics (heavy aromatics cut), C9+ aromatics (heavy cut), to gasoline blending Preliminary · Raffinate of aromatics extraction, Raffinate: non-aromatics with the unrecovered aromatics, to gasoline blending or steam cracking Preliminary · Toluene Preliminary · Mixed xylenes (with ethylbenzene) Preliminary

KPI benchmark positions

KPIValueReference rangePosition
Electricity per t of benzene, toluene and xylenes extracted– kWh/t11 to 72 kWh/t
Falcke, H. et al. (2017) Best Available Techniques (BAT) Reference Document for the Production of Large Volume Organic Chemicals. JRC Science for Policy Report EUR 28882 EN, doi:10.2760/77304 (bref)
not evaluated
Electricity, steam and fired heat per t of benzene, toluene and xylenes extracted– kWh/t633 to 1,564 kWh/t
Falcke, H. et al. (2017) Best Available Techniques (BAT) Reference Document for the Production of Large Volume Organic Chemicals. JRC Science for Policy Report EUR 28882 EN, doi:10.2760/77304 (bref)
not evaluated

Maturity and review

Design maturity Concept (claimed): An idea or first flowsheet; numbers are rough. No independent engineering review yet. Automated checks passing is not a review.

Calculation maturity, from the checked evidenceNot assessed

The process has no maturity report (cheme maturity, checks/maturity.json), so no calculation maturity is established.

No level shownThe design maturity (Concept) is the manifest's claim, not evidence. A level appears here once the process's repository holds a current report from cheme maturity --write.

Artifact completeness

Which deliverables exist. They never raise a calculation maturity level: a drawing from unchecked numbers is still unchecked.

Not reported without a maturity report.

Independent review

Not independently reviewed

No independent engineering review yet. Automated checks passing is not a review.

Set by people only. Reaching a calculation maturity level or passing automated checks is not an independent review or an approval.

Where the evidence comes from
Report
processes/btx-1/checks/maturity.json (not in the library)
Method
How ChemE-as-Code checks the levels (requirement by requirement)

Open items

0 open items · 0 closed

New action itemNew engineering holdNew technical queryNew design changeAll issues

Sources

Library version
a3c52e4 (process last changed in a3c52e4)
Data
Catalog record (JSON) · CC-BY-4.0
Files
View the files on GitHub · change history and authors

References

How to cite

For the data, cite the Process Atlas paper; for the platform that builds and checks it, the ChemE-as-Code paper.

Schweidtmann, A. M. & Weber, J. M. (2026, in preparation). Process Atlas: an open, git-native, reproducible library and life cycle inventory of chemical processes (working title).

For this process: "Benzene, toluene and mixed xylenes by solvent extraction of catalytic reformate", ChemE-as-Code process library, version a3c52e4.

BibTeX
@unpublished{schweidtmann_process_atlas,
  author = {Schweidtmann, Artur M. and Weber, Jana M.},
  title = {{Process Atlas: an open, git-native, reproducible library and life cycle inventory of chemical processes (working title)}},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://atlas.cheme-as-code.org},
  note = {in preparation}
}

Schweidtmann, A. M. (2026). ChemE-as-Code: An Open-Source Platform for Agentic AI in Chemical Engineering. arXiv:2611.07947. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2611.07947

BibTeX
@misc{schweidtmann_cheme_as_code,
  author = {Schweidtmann, Artur M.},
  title = {{ChemE-as-Code: An Open-Source Platform for Agentic AI in Chemical Engineering}},
  year = {2026},
  eprint = {2611.07947},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2611.07947},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07947}
}