(134d) Experiences on Energy Retrofit of Crude Units

Energy retrofit of crude units has always been profitable. Aside from profitability, impending carbon emmisions reductions mandates using different regulatory mechanisms, will make these projects almost a must. While there are techniques available to perform the energy integration for one crude, like pinch technology, these techniques have some shortcomings, which we will highlight. However, crude units operate using different types of blends and require one single efficient preheating train that can accomodate them. While academia has produced  so called multiperiod models to handle such problems, they are hard to implement and rarely converge for such large systems. We will present an alternative approach using HIT a recently developed methodology. When applied this technology has rendered returns that are higher than 20-30%.