Hydrogen Management in an Oil Refinery

1
Hydrogen Management in an Oil Refinery
CIORNEI1, G. BUMBAC1, A. TURCU1, I. IVANESCU2
and M. ILIE3
1 University Politehnica of Bucharest, Centre for
Technology Transfer in the Process Industries, 1,
Polizu Street,Building A, Room A056, Sector 1,
RO-011061, Bucharest, Roumania, email
cttip_at_chim.upb.ro 2National Oil Corporation
PETROM S.A., 109, Calea Victoriei, RO-010069
Bucharest, Romania, phone [phone], fax
40-21-2129875, email i.ivanescu_at_petrom.ro 3Na
tional Oil Corporation PETROM S.A., ARPECHIM
Subsidiary, RO-110181 Pitesti, County Arges,
Romania, phone [phone], fax
40-248-216300, email m.ilie_at_arpechim.ro
Case study
Introduction Hydrogen plays very important role
in oil refining to eliminate by hydrotreating
unwanted constituents as sulfur, nitrogen,
aromatic compounds from products as requested by
new regulations. Also, heavy oil needs to be
further processed to obtain light oil products by
hydrocracking. Hydrogen
production is very expensive process . Production
of hydrogen is associated with production of
pollutanats as by-products. In this context
management of hydorgen is a crucial problem in
oil refinry optimisation. Adapting to new
challenges often presents unprofitable choices
Investing in new processing capacity Importing
more expensive crude Loosing yield on valuable
products
Pinch Analysis-performed by DPI-UMIST REFOPT
software
HydrogenPinch
Target Savings 58.6 mole/s
Optimization techniques Using superstructures GA
MSIDE
HYDROGEN MANAGEMENT
is a lower (capital) cost alternative, a fresh
approach based on HydrogenPinch, technology
incorporating the economics of hydrogen supply,
process yield and optimisation techniques that
leads to practical and economically viable
solutions that meet the new specifications
required for todays refineries

• Identify the sources
• and the sinks

• Impose constrains
• Flow
• Purity
• Pressure
• Others

• Decompose compressors
• into sources and sinks

• Specify the Flow, Purity
• and Pressure

• Re-assemble
• compressors

Existing hydrogen flowsheet
Results
The new hydrogen flowsheet of the oil refinery
New pipes
Removed pipes
Analysis. Step I Pinch Analysis
Savings 18 moles of H2/s 873 600 /year
Analysis. Step II Synthesis of a better
hydrogen flowsheet