Petrochemicals

Advanced Hydrogen Management : More Than a Balancing Act

Mar 15, 2011
Sanjiv Ratan
Modern high complexity refining landscape involves increasing proportion of “opportunity crude” processing and widened bottom-of-the-barrel strategies, which together with ever stringent ‘clean fuels’ requirements has led to extensive need for hydrogen and its optimization in the refinery. This in...

More Refinery H2 through Efficiency, Recovery, and Process Improvements

Mar 15, 2011
Alan Zagoria
Hydrogen is even more important to refiners than it was just a few years ago. Heavier crudes, clean fuels, and increased conversion have increased hydrogen demand. Refiners can face costly choices if forced to adjust refinery operations to respond to hydrogen availability constraints. It is...

Operational Inputs Into the Mechanical Integrity Program

Mar 15, 2011
F. Russ Davis
A predictive mechanical integrity (MI) program is based on the following: * Damage mechanisms that affect process equipment. * Rate at which degradation progresses. * Ability of the inspection group to identify and correct equipment damage before equipment failure. Operational temperature, pressure...

Process Automation During Refinery Unit Transitions

Mar 15, 2011
Robert M. Tsai
Process Automation ideas and technologies have been used sporadically for decades. However, in US refineries, automation technologies are still relatively rare. Critics of the technology will often point to complexity, high upkeep, and difficulty in changing the status quo as stumbling blocks to...

Inferential Monitoring & Optimization of Crude Units Via Hybrid Models

Mar 15, 2011
Vladimir Mahalec
Refinery crude units often process variety of feedstocks. If properties of the feed entering the crude unit are not precisely known, it is difficult to predict how changes in the tower operating conditions will affect properties of the products. Similarly, if on-line analyzers are not available, it...

Reducing the Load on Cooling Towers through Revamping of Individual Coolers

Mar 14, 2011
Graham T. Polley
The engineering of cooling water systems involves a consideration of both hydraulic and thermal behaviour. Unfortunately this is often ignored. For instance when engineers seek to reduce the thermal load on cooling towers they will often opt for increased heat recovery (via improved heat...

New Continuous Coking Process

Mar 14, 2011
Douglas W. Sullivan
NEW CONTINUOUS COKING PROCESS A new coking process can accept resid feed from the conventional resid heater in a coking plant and continuously discharge vapor and dry petroleum coke particles. The process promotes a rapid recovery of volatiles from the resid enabling recovery of more volatiles. It...

Predicting Operating Regimes In Heavy Gas Oil Hydrotreating Reactors

Mar 14, 2011
Jinwen Chen
Predicting Operating Regimes in Heavy Gas Oil Hydrotreating Reactors Jinwen Chen and Mugurel Munteanu CanmetENERGY, Natural Resources Canada One Oil Patch Drive, Devon, AB, T9G 1A8, Canada Hydrotreating (HDT) or mild hydrocracking (HDC) of heavy gas oil or vacuum gas oil is an important step in...

Steam Utility Systems Are Not "Business as Usual" for Chemical Process Simulators

Mar 14, 2011
Jonathan Currie
The operating costs of a typical refinery utility system are so significant that small operational improvements can result in large annual savings. This paper introduces a new utility modelling package designed for PETRONAS to allow in-house modelling and optimization of their refinery and...

Pages

Subscribe to Petrochemicals