Industrial Experience in Handling Cleaning of Crude Refinery Preheat Trains

Industrial Experience in Handling Cleaning of Crude Refinery Preheat Trains

^1,2Ishiyama E.M., ¹Pugh S.J. and ²Wilson D.I.

¹IHS ESDU, Houndsditch, London EC3A 7BX, UK

²Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Cambridge, New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3RA, UK

Abstract

Oil refineries are a major part of the national economy: in the UK alone, there are nine major refineries, processing over 1.8 million barrels of crude oil per day (Watson and Vandervell, 2006), consuming energy at the rate of gigawatts (~ 7.9 GW: Marsh-Patrick, 2006). Heat exchangers (HEXs) play a major role on refineries in saving energy. Distillation is the main consumer of energy on a refinery, and networks of HEXs are connected together in a preheat train to reduce the duty on furnaces. These units all suffer from fouling. Based on the world crude oil consumption of ~ 88 MM bbl per day (in 2009 2010), around 36 MM tonnes per year of extra CO₂ is estimated to be emitted due to fouling (IHS ESDU, 2011). Handling fouling is a major challenge, and to-date, total elimination of fouling has not been achieved. Hence, cleaning of refinery exchangers is considered a practical solution. Since the original work done by Georgiadia and Papageorgiou (2000) and Smaïli et al. (2001), optimizing scheduling in a practical perspective has taken broader attention (e.g. Ishiyama et al., 2010). In this paper we discuss practical industrial concerns on scheduling cleaning in crude refinery exchangers and demonstrate a novel heat exchanger network simulation tool, smartPM, used to mitigate fouling in a techno-economic perspective.

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Ishiyama E.M., Paterson W.R., Wilson D.I., Heins, A.V. and Spinelli L. (2010). Scheduling cleaning in a crude oil preheat train subject to fouling: incorporating desalter control, Applied Thermal Engineering, 30(13), 1852-1862.

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