(158e) Advancements in Catalytic Coatings for Coke Gasification: Year 11 - Update of Three Full Lifecycle Field Trials of CAMOL Products in Medium Severity Cracking

Hydrocarbon steam pyrolysis is used to produce over 180 and 120 million tonnes annually of ethylene and propylene, respectively. As economics have continued to favour higher severities in steam cracking, the materials supply industry has striven to provide tube alloys / coatings / surfaces / internal profiles to contain and manage the process’ severity demands. In the last 20 years alone, medium severity ethane cracking (primarily defined as ~64-67% ethane conversion, with 0.25-0.35 Steam-to-Hydrocarbon ratio, maximum End-of-Run (EOR) Tube-metal-Temperature (TMT) <1090 °C, and well controlled decoking) has advanced from an average of 20-50 day runlengths to 60-100 days now being common. Some operators routinely achieve 500+ day runlengths with proper furnace coil alloy and surface technologies, along with good furnace and feedstock controls. Extreme bookends of ethane medium severity runlengths range from 1 day and up to 1,000 days primarily due to the control of the topmost few nanometres of the internal tube surface.

The development of catalytic (gasifying) furnace coatings has been advancing since ~2000, driven by the preference and need to mitigate both filamentous and amorphous coke-make. This dual objective cannot be achieved with coil materials and technologies that are engineered solely to provide an internal tube surface that is inert to filamentous coke-make, for example, alumina-formers, silica-formers and spinel-formers. Quantiam’s CAMOL^TM (“Catalytically-assisted Manufacture of Olefins”) catalytic coatings commenced field demonstration trials in 2006, was commercialized in 2012, and now exceeds 10 furnace installations operating at various cracking severities. The trials have mapped and demonstrated the benefits of CAMOL^TM across full coil life cycles when remaining reasonably within the operating envelopes of the base steel and the coatings, as well as mapping regimes outside of the operating envelopes of the materials systems.

Furnace operation of CAMOL^TM products within the operating envelopes has demonstrated runlength improvements of >10X in ethane cracking and >2X in naphtha cracking for furnace-specific coil life cycles ranging from 4.5 to 7.5 years, depending on site-specific operating conditions. These runlength improvements have also been accompanied by energy reductions of up to 6% per unit of production. The first two installations in ethane cracking furnaces (2006-2011 and 2008-2016), and a third installation in naphtha cracking (2010-2016), have now completed one full life cycle. This paper follows up on 1-year and 4-year updates previously presented at the AIChE Ethylene Producers’ Conference in 2008 and 2010, and provides a Year-11 update on the three full life cycles completed and now fully autopsied. The discussion will focus on autopsy results from start-of-life to end-of-life, specifically on the steel metallurgy, coating, and surface properties responsible for delivering anti-coking benefits and their correlation with furnace operating conditions and benefits realized or realizable. Finally, a summary of Quantiam’s new line of coated products for higher severity cracking that are being advanced based on all learnings to date from the field will be provided with field trials targeting to commence in 2020.