1. General

1.1 Introduction

The considerable development of petrochemicals, linked to the growth of industries producing plastics, synthetic fibers, synthetic elastomers, detergents and many other organic chemical products, requires greater quantities of hydrocarbon raw materials every year.

However, natural gas and the petroleum fractions obtained by distillation after primary fractionation of crude oil are mainly made up of saturated hydrocarbons, kerosenes (alkanes) and naphthenes (cyclanes), whose chemical reactivity is mediocre and which only give rise to slow, unselective chemical transformations: they hardly allow us to achieve a wide variety of more or less complex chemical compounds. On the other hand, unsaturated aliphatic or aromatic hydrocarbons can be obtained...