Ethylene Furnace Recovery Quench Oil Circuit Optimization
Southwest Process Technology Conference
2016
8th Southwest Process Technology Conference
Southwest Process Technology Conference
Energy Efficiency
Thursday, October 6, 2016 - 10:20am to 10:45am
A 50% reduction in heat dissipation to cooling tower water was achieved in the ethylene furnace recovery section at Beaumont Chemical Plant via improvements in constrained multi-variable control by a team of operations and engineering. Following strategy was employed successfully:
- The Primary Fractionator cutpoint temperature was maximized against tower overheads and bottoms constraints resulted in lessening the heat losses to CT water.
- Quench oil flow to downstream distillation tower reboilers was maximized against hydraulic constraints in quench oil circuit while minimizing supplemental reboiler steam.
This amounted to an additional 175,200 MMBTU/Y energy being recovered from quench oil as reboiler duty in downstream distillation towers while unloading the CT exchangers in QO circuit.