Background: A Chinese refinery, with a capacity of 13 MMTPA, commissioned PIL to identify beneficial retrofit projects for improving the performance of their hydrogen system and increasing Light Hydrocarbon (LHC) recovery from Fuel Gas System.
Challenges: The refinery has an extremely complex Hydrogen Network comprising 13 H2 Consumers, 5 H2 Producers, 20 Compressors, 1 Gas Plant and 1 PSA. Each Hydrogen Consumer required different Hydrogen specification and each Hydrogen Producer required different Hydrogen quality. Some of the additional challenges had risen from technical difficulties in H2 and LHC recovery, inadequate operating flexibility and limited H2 purification capacity.
Solution: PIL used its unique software i-H2™ to solve both process and network level issues to form 4 integrated solutions for the clients.
The client selected Investment free optimization and Low CAPEX Retrofit 2 for implementation. A road map was developed for implementing the retrofit changes.
Some of the key improvements made during this project were:
· H2 cascading improvements
· Optimization of processes operating conditions
· Integrated recovery of H2 and Light Hydrocarbons (LHC)
· Gas plant debottlenecking
· Process and site level configuration optimization
· Assessing how individual options affect the whole network
· Integration between systems