Hydrogenation technology is an important chemical upgrading process for low quality oil such as coal tar. Kinetic modeling for hydrogenation process remains a challenging task because of the large amount of compounds and complex reactions involved. Therefore, a new systematic methodology is proposed in this study to characterize mixture streams for the kinetic modeling of coal tar hydrogenation. The methodology incorporates both lumped method based on boiling point to represent feedstock and a carbon number-based component approach in the form of a structural matrix to characterize products at a molecular level. A mathematical transformation model is built for interrelating the bulk properties and molecular composition of products. A detailed kinetic model for coal tar hydrogenation is constructed based on the reaction pathway networks between lumped feedstock and carbon number-based molecular product. Detailed molecular compositions of the products are obtained from experiments to provide a basis for estimating the parameters of the kinetic model. The proposed method is verified by experiment results, which are consistent with predicted values. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.