Process enhancement solutions delivering yields that impress
One of the main difficulties our clients in the Gulf area face is about performing maintenance on Heat Exchangers outside the normal turnaround window.
If an exchanger is underperforming or about to break, the most common options are either to cut rates or to take an unplanned outage for repairs. This hurt plant profitability seriously. Aggreko helps refineries by providing temporary heat transfer equipment so that the unit can continue to run while maintenance is completed. We are often able to connect to a running unit without the need for hot taps or any kind of outage.
Some key applications prior to a turnaround include:
-
Maintaining production during a coker outage
Aggreko can develop a robust cooling solution to allow facilities to cool the vacuum resid normally fed to the DCU and decouple multiple units
-
Innovative reactor cooling to shorten turnarounds
Traditional methods of cooling a hydrotreater fixed bed reactor by using nitrogen could take several days. Aggreko has developed a solution to eliminated 24 hours from their turnaround and return to full operations much quicker.
-
Flareless turnarounds
The need to reduce hydrocarbon gas load to a flare system during a cracking unit turnaround can drive an Aggreko solution where you are able to greatly reduce emissions, unload the flare and shorten critical path of this step.
-
Unit decouplings
Refiners are looking for smarter ways to execute turnarounds. Historically integrated units were thought of as single entities, and they were taken down and brought up together even if only one unit required maintenance. Changing that paradigm, refiners and petrochemical plants are now looking for ways to replicate the heat integration between units to allow them to divorce the units and bring them up or take them down independently.
-
Alkylation unit turnarounds
Aggreko has designed and supplied multiple tower systems to cool water supply and return headers going to and from the adjacent unit to deliver cooling water.