2019.02.18
Your Coker Maintenance Does Not Have to Mean a Total Shutdown. Here's why.
What happens in your refinery when you have a turnaround lined up? Specifically, when you need to shut down your Coker for planned maintenance?
Do you shut everything down and take the economic hit, or have you figured out a way to limit the outage to just the sections that need maintenance?
You might be thinking: but that’s impossible! The crude unit feeds our whole refinery. How could we keep things going if the Coker is down?
It’s a good question – and one to which most refineries think there’s no answer. Typically, when maintenance is scheduled on the Coker, they presume there’s no way around it and accept the huge loss of productivity and profits as unavoidable. The thing is, you may not have to, as there may be alternative solutions.
Here it is, in a nutshell: you decouple the units, only taking down the unit that’s scheduled for maintenance, and storing feed material for this unit the period of downtime. This material is then reheated and reprocessed when it comes back online.
This gets around the problem you have when each unit “runs down hot” to the next one. Usually, the crude unit “runs down hot” to the vacuum tower which “runs down hot” to the Coker. If you don’t have a buffer between them, when you need to schedule a turnaround on one unit, you need to close each unit before it in the chain, too. The beauty of decoupling is that you create that buffer between each unit, so you can isolate one unit without affecting the others.
Decoupling heat integrated units is a challenging undertaking. How do I manage the heat balance in feed-effluent exchanger configurations? How do I mitigate safety risks with safely cooling crude and hot oil temperatures in excess of 600F? These are only a couple of questions a refiner may have when considering decoupling units that are integrated together, either by feed or by heat.
Aggreko has successfully developed solutions and commercially demonstrated projects that have allowed refiners to de-couple units. These projects have allowed refiners to:
- Maintain production with critical units
- Remove a unit outage from a turnaround scope of work
- Address an unplanned maintenance need without impacting other production units
Can you imagine what a difference it would make to your refinery if you could keep production up all the way through that turnaround? If all the other units kept running as normal?
Let’s say you have a 150,000 BPD refinery, where the marginal crude rate is $5/bbl. Over the course of a six-week turnaround, the flexibility to shut down just the unit that needs maintenance and keep the rest optional would save you around $26million!
But wouldn’t the capital expenditure eat into those profits? You may be wondering.
Sure, if you’re buying all the equipment yourself, but that’s not advisable. A top critical utilities rental company will not only bring in an excellent temporary solution for this purpose, but they’ll also use their expertise to set it up, oversee the process, and ensure you stay at the maximum possible productivity levels until all your units are back online.
With the right partner to guide you, there’s always a smart alternative - and a turnaround never has to mean a total shutdown.
Learn more about our solutions for the petrochemical and refining sector
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