Jan Verstraete

Dr. Jan VERSTRAETE is a Senior Research Engineer at the Industrial Development Center of IFP Energies nouvelles (IFPEN) in Lyon (France). He holds a M.S. degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Ghent (Belgium) and a Ph.D. (1997) from the same university, where he developed fundamental kinetic models for catalytic reforming under the supervision of Prof. dr. Gilbert Froment.

He joined the IFPEN-Lyon research center in 1994, where he first worked on the modeling of various refining processes, including catalytic reforming, gas oil hydrotreating and Fluid Catalytic Cracking. In 1996, he became a member of the FCC project team and was appointed FCC R&D project manager in 1999, a position where he directed the FCC research team during 6 years and was in charge of coordinating IFPEN's fluid catalytic cracking research with TOTAL, Shaw - Stone & Webster, and Axens. He has been the recipient of the AFTP 2006 Award (award given by the French Petroleum Refiners Association) for the development of the FCC Riser Separator system (RS2). From 2004 onwards, he has been R&D project manager for Ebullated-Bed Hydrocracking for 10 years and R&D project manager for fixed-bed Atmospheric Residue Desulfurization (ARDS) for 3 years, while also being involved in applied research on solvent deasphalting and direct hydrotreating and hydroprocessing of crude oils. One of the main concerns in this research pertained to studying the effects of the concentration and nature of asphaltenes on the unit performances, as well as developing means to reduce their negative effects. Early 2018, he has been appointed R&D project manager for the Catalytic Crude to Chemicals project. Concurrently, he has continued modeling work on various refining processes (residue hydrotreating, VGO hydrocracking, and VR hydroconversion). He has been an active member of the Eurokin Consortium that aims at implementing best practices in the area of chemical reaction kinetics. On the more fundamental side, he has also been directing basic research projects, and particularly on feed composition modeling and reaction modeling, through the supervision of 14 Ph.D. theses and several post-doctoral students, while leading several basic research projects on Molecular Reconstruction of Petroleum fractions, on Modeling of Residue Hydroprocessing, and on Multi-Scale Modeling. Jan VERSTRAETE is the author and co-author of 51 scientific publications (h-index: 20 (WOS), 22 (Scopus), 25 (Google Scholar), as of September 1st, 2022), 2 book chapters, and 20 patents.