It’s in a refinery’s remit to avoid shutdowns at all costs. But when you have a major sixweek turnaround on a coker unit coming up, you need a plan in place to deal with the output from upstream units, or the entire refinery could face shutdown. A large Gulf Coast refinery – which converts more than 300,000 barrels of crude oil per day into motor gasoline, jet fuel and diesel fuel – was in this situation. The coker was due for turnaround, and unless they found a way to safely store the vacuum tower bottoms (VTB) that are fed daily into the coker, the whole refinery would have to shut down. However, with a temperature of 600°F (315°C) storing coker feed is a significant challenge.