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On October 9, 2025, Guangdong Petrochemical's Marketing and Transportation Department reported another success: during the recent National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival holidays, the company strengthened quality control and strictly enforced standards for products leaving the factory, ensuring that all product indicators exceeded internal control standards, winning widespread customer trust. This achievement is highly consistent with the "all qualified" results of the Guangdong Provincial Market Supervision Bureau's spot check in September, coupled with the continued "satisfaction" feedback from customers in Hunan and Guangdong, together forming the "dual certifications" of Guangdong Petrochemical's superior quality.
Over the past three years, Guangdong Petrochemical employees have overcome one technical challenge after another with their wisdom and hard work, "conquering" the market, "refining" purity, and "creating" new products, building a highly competitive high-quality product matrix.
At 6 PM on October 10, an oil tanker fully loaded with 40,000 tons of jet fuel departed for Hong Kong. This familiar scene still fills the engineers of the terminal operations department with pride.
“We eagerly await the arrival of the oil tankers. Their docking signifies that our products are once again exported,” said engineer Lin Weijie with a smile. “Every time we see a ship sailing towards Hong Kong, Malaysia, and other destinations, we feel incredibly reassured!”
“The quality requirements for exported oil products are extremely stringent, like engraving words on a grain of rice with a needle—even the slightest deviation is unacceptable,” said Luo Yi, assistant manager of the Refining Department III, who has over 20 years of experience in the industry. Guangdong Petrochemical is an integrated refining and chemical project that processes only heavy and low-quality crude oil. The processing is challenging, and international customers have much higher requirements for key indicators such as flash point, freezing point, and cleanliness of the finished oil products than domestic standards.
To address this, Guangdong Petrochemical's leadership and team worked tirelessly in the plant area, optimizing each step of the process, including hydrocracking, fractionation, and desulfurization. “We adjusted more than 20 parameters, conducted nearly 100 experiments, and at the most intense times, we stayed in the control room for 72 consecutive hours,” said chief engineer Deng Yufeng. Through continuous adjustments, the jet fuel smoke point was increased from 22 mm to over 26 mm, and silver corrosion reached level 0 or below, fully meeting the highest international standards.
The diesel team simultaneously tackled the challenge of producing ultra-low sulfur diesel. Engineer Gao Shangdong likened it to "a picky child, extremely sensitive to raw materials and operations." By controlling reaction temperature and scientifically proportioning raw materials, the team ultimately stabilized the kinematic viscosity of the diesel at over 3.3 mm²/s and the sulfur content at less than 1 mg/kg.
Since the beginning of this year, Guangdong Petrochemical has exported over 2 million tons of various products to more than ten countries and regions, including Australia, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam. The product qualification rate has reached 100%, winning high recognition from international customers.
At Guangdong Petrochemical, the aromatics complex is like a chef pursuing perfection, dedicated to maximizing the value of every raw material.
Song Hongbo, a process engineer with over 30 years of experience in the aromatics industry, recalled his mixed feelings when he first encountered the 2.6 million-ton-scale plant five years ago: "This is one of the world's largest single-unit aromatics plants. There was no mature experience to draw upon; it was truly a 'tough nut to crack.'" He and his team made "stable, long-term, full-capacity, and efficient operation of the plant, producing high-efficiency aromatics products" their core objective. They considered the purity of paraxylene their "lifeline," optimizing adsorption tower parameters and adjusting rotary valve switching times to maintain a product purity consistently above 99.75%, far exceeding national standards and ranking among the industry leaders.
The team also continuously explored load matching among the six major units. Utilizing the Intelligent Power Control System (IPC), they optimized the reflux ratio of the heaters and 12 distillation columns, significantly reducing ineffective material circulation. The adsorption tower circulation volume was more than 10% lower than the design value, and the thermal efficiency of all seven heaters exceeded 94%.
Faced with impurity accumulation due to high loads, Song Hongbo led his team in innovative design of new pipelines, successfully solving the problem of light oily waste discharge, reducing monthly emissions by nearly 1,000 tons and significantly reducing plant losses. Currently, the unit's overall energy consumption is far below the industry benchmark, continuing to lead the industry.
In August of this year, through further optimization of the A8 re-distillation tower operation and adjustment of the heating furnace fuel method, energy consumption decreased by another 1.4 kg of standard oil per ton compared to July. To date, the purity of paraxylene remains above 99.75%, and the yield is stable between 96% and 97%.
At Guangdong Petrochemical, the most frequently mentioned topic in the Chemical Division II is "production conversion." Since its commissioning, the four polyolefin units have completed more than 230 production conversions. Employees jokingly say, "We're either converting production, or on our way to converting production."
Developing new grades is also a tough nut to crack. In September of this year, the company ushered in a "New Product Week," with three new grades successfully trial-producing within a week. Taking PE-HD5533B, a dairy packaging material, as an example, the team comprehensively considered market demand and process feasibility. By fine-tuning the index and density, precisely switching the nitrogen and additive systems, and closely monitoring reactor temperature, static electricity, and other parameters, they achieved a smooth transition from DMDA-6200 to PE-HD5533B. This product boasts high melt strength and excellent processing stability, making it particularly suitable for dairy and beverage bottle production, significantly increasing added value.
When developing PP-HM0700 thin-wall injection molding compound, the team significantly shortened adjustment time by optimizing trial production plans, coordinating propylene inventory, procuring additives in advance, and using the APC system to predict the hydrogen-to-carbon ratio. Precise pellet cutting and additive switching effectively reduced the generation of transition materials.
To date, the company has successfully developed 20 high-efficiency new material products, including three grades such as metallocene polyethylene that have reached international advanced levels. High-density pipe-specific materials have obtained national certification, and several film products lead the industry. The total volume of new products exceeds 1.7 million tons, ranking first among Chinese petroleum refining enterprises in terms of both variety and output.
