(358f) New Digital Method Enables Flexibility, Production, and Reliability Improvements While Mitigating Overhead Corrosion from Tramp Amines

In the pursuit of efficient and profitable refinery operations, owner-operators must continuously balance feedstock flexibility and product optimization with both mechanical availability and long-/short-term asset-protection. Further complicating this process is the limited ability to effectively determine which operational adjustments are most impactful. Many refineries today sometimes face periods of severe corrosion and associated fouling in the internals of atmospheric towers and overhead condensate systems. Often the corrosion problems are tied to incoming crude changes and considered largely unavoidable. This situation can lead to implementation of overly conservative short or long-term solutions at the exclusion of more complex but effective ones. Over time, the lack of ability to rapidly detect, define, analyze and respond to the rapidly changing drivers of corrosion has dramatically limited the effectiveness of practical solutions. This situation unnecessarily increases the costs and operational risks at a refinery.

Recent introductions of equipment allowing real-time monitoring of key overhead parameters has helped reveal a variety of continuing episodic system fluctuations leading to significant impact on corrosion. In parallel, high frequency and low latency amine speciation analysis is bringing ongoing information about crude contaminant changes and their impacts on the overhead system. To take advantage of the wealth of information available today, new digital platforms capable of effectively handling the data are needed. By increasing the frequency and sophistication with which salt formation data are collected and analyzed, refineries can achieve more proactive ways of controlling corrosion and fouling while simultaneously achieving production and quality targets. This paper will present real examples taken from operating refineries to illustrate new and effective ways of mitigating overhead corrosion problems using streaming telemetry and sophisticated data analytics.