Raising The Productivity Anywhere Possible

Hello,

Before I get started, I’m going to give a fair warning.  This week may be a bit more on the technical side.  I’ll try to stop and explain as I go, but I may overlook something, and for that I say sorry in advance.   Well, let’s get into it.

This week we will discuss the optimization of a more specific part of the process allowing us to gain insight into just HOW much goes into oil refinery optimization (from the very general layout to the extremely specific).  For that we will be using the catalyst in the fluid catalytic cracker (FCC) as an example.  Don’t worry, I’m already taking a step back to explain.  So the FCC is a unit that is very important to an oil refinery.  It is one of the more productive units that is used early on in the refinery process to crack hydrocarbons to create gasoline.  To help heat the oil the FCC unit uses a catalyst (hence fluid catalytic cracker).  

Cool now that we got that explanation out of the way, what is there to optimize here.  Let’s look at the catalyst itself.  The catalyst has been heavily optimized, looking for the best compound to use to get the best production from the unit.  However, optimization goes further.  At Fluor I learned that they have looked further here than most anyone else.  Currently, there is a tray sitting over the catalyst that distributes the oil down onto it, and the tray sits on a ring on the unit’s wall.  This means that some of the catalyst lays below this ring.  How much? Up to 20% to be exact.  The reason this is important is that the current system of distributing the oil has an extremely difficult time of distributing the oil unto this 20%.  As you would expect, this causes a loss in productivity, and is one of the many reasons (more possibly overlooked even now) that the actual productivity is lower than on paper.  

So how did Fluor look to solve this problem?  They developed a new way distribute the oil, allowing it to spread out more.  This means that the oil is able to reach the edges more as well as making the catalyst in the middle areas do less work.  Overall, this leads to a large productivity increase.  I don’t want to go into much detail as to how they do this to make sure I don’t share anything I shouldn’t.  Anyways that is what I have for this week.  Next week I’ll have another example and will go into the importance of these specific examples of optimization.

Stephen