RMC-00-104 HEATER TUBE LIFE MANAGEMENT

Description:

An effective tube management program can reduce equipment costs at a medium-size refinery by one million dollars per year or more. ERA Technology’s Heater Tube Life Management Program is currently being applied at Koch Refining's Pine Bend, MN, and Corpus Christi, TX refineries. Results-to-date have demonstrated a savings of more than 20 times the cost of the program in 12 months at the Pine Bend refinery alone. Savings are expected to increase as the benefits of the program are achieved throughout each refinery. The program consists of heater prioritization (ranking) by a modified API 530 assessment, heater tube inspection to establish baseline conditions of diametral strain, hardness, and microstructure, and remaining life assessment by a proprietary computer program based on probabilistic analysis. The technical basis for the program is outlined, and examples of the program output are reviewed. Equipment cost savings achieved by this program primarily result from delayed tube replacement made possible by a more realistic assessment of remaining life and quantification of risk. Risk factors previously assumed by Koch were necessarily more conservative in the absence of specific economic risk factors as supplied by ERA's program. The ERA risk factors were based on individual probability of failure curves derived for each heater. Specific results of applying the program to a coker charge heater and a platformer intermediate heater at Pine Bend are discussed.