Challenge
A major oil and gas refinery in Louisiana was fast approaching on a major turnaround where the coker flare and adjacent unit would need to be taken down for maintenance. The adjacent unit was home to the flare scrubber where all daily vents from multiple units, such as the Coker, Diesel Hydrotreater, Sulfur Plant, Sour Water Stripper, and Gasoline Hydrotreater, came from. Having this unit shut down along with the specially designed flare would mean that all vents would need to be routed to a backup flare, one that was ill-equipped to handle the “sour” vapor streams of the plant. The option to route the vents to their onsite amine scrubbers would cost the facility around $7 to $8 MM in production.
Solution
Envent’s technical team along with project engineers worked with the refinery to scope and design a scrubber system that would perform H2S and SO2 removal before vapors would be routed to their backup flare. Envent sized and built blowers that allowed the vent header to retain its day to day pressures while routing vapors from their flare header to Envent’s temporary scrubber system. The system was equipped with High-Pressure KO Drums, HP Stainless Steel Caustic Scrubbers, Automatic isolation valves, temperature, and pressure transmitters and sensors. All equipment was installed per strict MOCs guidelines and Class I Div II location requirements. Envent provided a fully-manned operation with two technicians around the clock for the entire duration of the 30 plus day outage.
Benefit
The customer was able to keep the operation of their site’s amine scrubbers and save upwards of $8,000,000 in production cost, all while continuing to operate their main units during a planned shutdown. Envent was able to keep the refinery environmentally compliant by ensuring that all vapors vented to their backup flare were below ~5ppm of H2S/SO2.
