AM-01-06 OPTICOKING TECHNOLOGY

Description:

The current trend in the U.S. refining industry is to process heavier, cheaper crudes. This results in refiners having to contend with increasing volumes of residual streams. This, in turn, increases the demands on residual conversion processes, especially delayed coking. Since the greater part of a barrel of residuum (bottoms from atmospheric and vacuum distillation columns) produced can be converted to light ends, gasoline, distillate, and gas oil in a coker, the coker has become a critical unit in today’s complex refinery economics. Cokers are often the principal bottleneck in a refinery. The delayed coker is the only main process in a modern petroleum refinery that is a batch-continuous process. Flow to the furnace is continuous, while the heater outlet is alternated between two batch drums. Vapors exiting the drums are processed in a fractionator tower. While one drum is on-line with feed, the other drum is being stripped, cooled, decoked, and warmed. This cycle of events has a tendency to generate numerous operating problems commensurate with this type of operation, such as pressure swings, unstable operation, etc. In an effort to dampen the severity of these problems, URS has developed a proprietary technology called OptiCoking. Opticoking can be applied to Delayed Cokers to improve their operating efficiencies as well as certain down-stream operations. Some of the improvements that refiners may see as a result of OptiCoking are: • Ability to increase coker charge rate. • Increased recovery of liquid products. • Reduced coke yield. • Reduced silicon anti-foam consumption and cost. • More stable unit operations. This innovative technology can be implemented with minimal capital expenditure and minimal impact on current operations. Opticoking is a viable option to capital intensive alternatives.