It is a challenge to remove mercaptans as well as to keep octane value in clean gasoline production. In this work, gas-liquid-solid heterogeneous base-catalyzed oxidation of tert-butyl thiol by molecular oxygen was investigated. The reactivity and stability of modified MgO catalysts were studied. The catalysts were further characterized by XRD, FT-IR, CO2-TPD, H-2-TPD, O-2-TPD and EPR. Compared with commercial cobalt phthalocyanine catalyst (CoPc catalyst), the modified MgO catalyst displayed an enhanced stability to the oxidation of tert-butyl thiol, and the catalytic lifetime is 10 h longer than that of CoPc catalyst at 3.0 h(-1) of LHSV. It was found that the active sites of the catalysts are defects and basic centers. In addition, the basic sites responsible for the reactivity are mainly the medium and strong basic centers. It is interesting that the part of O-3C(2-) - Mg-3C(2+) provides medium basic centers, however, the other part of it supplies as strong basic centers. It was demonstrated that superoxide anions O-2(-) served as the active oxygen species. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.