Upgrading the bottom of the barrel for clean fuel production, developing new engines with optimized catalytic posttreatments, implementing clean catalytic combustion technologies, improving the overall CO2 balance via catalytic processes and, lastly, developing new water purification techniques represent major upheavals in catalysis linked to refining and environmental protection. This paper, thus, will focus on the determining contribution of catalysis to the most recent achievements in these domains. A technico-economic approach will follow, underlining their main incentives and drawbacks within the framework of future environmental constraints.