Sourced conceptual inventory per tonne of hydrocracked products (LPG to diesel range, unsplit): conversion, bleed, hydrogen, fuel, power, water and catalyst from EU REF BREF ranges, closed by surrogate-compound element balances. No flowsheet; not reviewed.
Hydrocracking of vacuum gas oil, single-stage recycle
Sourced conceptual inventory per tonne of hydrocracked products (LPG to diesel range, unsplit): conversion, bleed, hydrogen, fuel, power, water and catalyst from EU REF BREF ranges, closed by surrogate-compound element balances. No flowsheet; not reviewed.
Research outputNot engineering advice and not an approved design: do not use it for construction, operation or safety decisions. What this means
Overview
- Capacity
- per tonne of hydrocracked products (the dataset's basis); no plant size
What goes in and out
In
- Vacuum gas oilFeedstock
- HydrogenReactantchemical consumption; linked to hydrogen-1 (lca/mappings.yaml)
- MethaneFeedstockheater fuel, natural gas taken as pure methane (ASSUMED; a refinery fires mostly its own fuel gas)
- AirFeedstockcombustion air, free; its O2 is feed:O2
- WaterFeedstockwash water, ASSUMED equal to the sour water
Out
- Hydrocracked products (LPG to diesel range)Main product
- Refinery fuel gasCo-productC1-C2 gas from the LP separator, to the refinery fuel system after amine treating; modelled as ethane
- Hydrocracker unconverted oil (bleed)Co-productbleed of 2 to 3 % on fresh feed; modelled as triacontane
- Hydrogen sulfideBy-productin the sour gas, to amine treating and sulfur recovery
- Carbon dioxideEmission
- WaterEmissioncombustion water vapour
- WastewaterWastesour water, via the sour water stripper
Utilities: Electricity
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 Hydrocracked products (LPG to diesel range), Hydrocracked products, LPG to diesel range (unsplit) Preliminary; Refinery fuel gas, C1-C2 gas to the refinery fuel system (after amine treating) Preliminary; Hydrocracker unconverted oil (bleed), Unconverted-oil bleed (to FCC, fuel oil or lube base oil) 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 4 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
- energy (physical-energy, from mappings) · product:fuel-gas 1.1 %, product:hydrocracked-products 96.5 %, product:unconverted-oil 2.4 %
- Allocation findings
- none
- Change report
- Not available: this build has no change report against an earlier release.
- Dataset pages
- Refinery fuel gas, C1-C2 gas to the refinery fuel system (after amine treating) Preliminary · Hydrocracked products (LPG to diesel range), Hydrocracked products, LPG to diesel range (unsplit) Preliminary · Hydrocracker unconverted oil (bleed), Unconverted-oil bleed (to FCC, fuel oil or lube base oil) Preliminary
KPI benchmark positions
| KPI | Value | Reference range | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hydrogen chemically consumed per t of fresh feed, vacuum gas oil hydrocracking No open per-mass range independent of the dataset found (2026-11-05). The REF BREF range (Table 3.62, 260 to 400 Nm3/t) is the dataset's own source. Per-barrel figures (US DOE 1998, Energetics, section 4.1.4: 1000 to 2500 scf/bbl) need a feed density to become kg/t, a modelling step. Searched: open reviews and course notes on VGO hydrocracking (only scf/bbl or single pilot-test values, e.g. Peng et al. 2018, Front. Chem. Sci. Eng. 12:867). | – kg/t | not available | not evaluated |
| Sour water per t of fresh feed, hydrocracking No open range independent of the dataset found (2026-11-05). The REF BREF range (section 3.13.2, 50 to 110 l/t) is the dataset's own source; no other open source read for this entry states a hydrocracker waste-water flow. | – kg/t | not available | not evaluated |
| Electricity per t of fresh feed, hydrocracking No open range independent of the dataset found (2026-11-05). The REF BREF range (Table 3.66, 20 to 150 kWh/t, after Sema, Sofres 1991 and VROM 1999) is the dataset's own source. Read and not usable: US DOE 1998 (Energetics, Table 4-8, per bbl), DOE 2006 Energy Bandwidth (no hydrocracking section), PRELIM v1.5 documentation (no values printed). | – kWh/t | not available | 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/hydrocracking-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
- Barthe, P., Chaugny, M., Roudier, S., Delgado Sancho, L. (2015) Best Available Techniques (BAT) Reference Document for the Refining of Mineral Oil and Gas. JRC Science and Policy Report EUR 27140 EN (JRC94879), sections 2.13, 3.13 and 3.13.2 · doi:10.2791/010758
- IPCC (2006) 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, Volume 2: Energy, chapter 1 (Table 1.2) and chapter 2 (Table 2.2)
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: "Hydrocracking of vacuum gas oil, single-stage recycle", 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}
}