(232a) Energy Saving in Crude Oil Pre-Heat Train for Predetermined Retrofit-Level Based Target

Refined products supplies are very tight and this trend will continue for some years to come. The market is suffering high level of uncertainty due to the current limited refining capacities. Nowadays, it is a common industrial practice to push oil refineries to work closer to its constraints and sometimes beyond its rated capacities. Retrofit projects are very expensive especially in situations where a potential for disturbance in production is foreseen. Production facilities are continuously watching for their energy bills and to reduce their GHG emissions. Pushing the envelope in this direction through retrofit projects is a difficult path to take. Any retrofit project has to be carefully planned to avoid any unpleasant surprises. Besides, the process owners decide the level of retrofit work that can be accepted and implemented by their refinery management before any talk about more energy savings and emissions reduction. This approach for heat recovery systems that put the emphasis on the minimization of the structural modifications ahead of energy saving is a reverse logic of the one that rendered the community the original heat integration retrofit problem; addressed by pinch technology in the eighties. In this paper we introduce the results of an industrial case study for typical crude preheat train retrofit problem that maximize energy savings subject to a priori retrofit-level target decided by process owners in form of minimum number of stream-splitting. The beforehand retrofit-level target in this paper is ?maximum of two splits in the crude stream in the preheat train is the only permitted modification?. The paper shows that even under this very limited degree of freedom, there is room for improving the energy consumption, GHG emissions and/or de-bottlenecking the crude heater.