“There was proposed a very interesting idea: Tar having a large amount of carbon and less amount of hydrogen in its molecules, and some waste, let us say, polyethylene, polypropylene, which have, on the contrary, more hydrogen than carbon can simultaneously be put in the reactor. You will get an absolutely wonderful effect, with a certain catalyst, in the reactor. Both types of waste are recycled with the yields actually up to 92%. As a result, we get high-quality fuel,” the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences said.

According to him, this technology allows us, on the one hand, to obtain cheap raw materials for petrochemistry and oil refining, and on the other, to effectively solve the waste disposal problem.

“We are aware of the tar problem: we have a lot of heavy fractions left as a result of fuel production, and all the landfills are filled with tar. There are certain procedures – using various catalysts, it is possible to obtain products from the tar, which are again used for fuel,” he said.

“This technology has a number of advantages – for example, the process can be carried out at low pressures. For comparison, similar technologies have a minimum pressure of one hundred and fifty to two hundred atmospheres. Our technologies operate at the pressure of seventy to ninety atmospheres. A completely new principle of catalysis is applied here – we called it nanoheterogeneous catalysis or catalysis in the dispersed phase. The catalyst particles are very small there, they are comparable to heavy oil particles. Asphalt-resinous compounds make cracking easy, and heavy oil particles get activated,” Anton Maximov, Director of TIPS RAS, Doctor of Chemical Sciences, the Scientific Russia said earlier. This technology is already being tested at the TANECO petrochemical plant in Tatarstan. The pilot plant capacity is to be 50 thousand tons per year.