USE OF GPA RESEARCH PROGRAM DATA/SOFTWARE FOR TROUBLE SHOOTING AND SOLVING OPERATIONAL ISSUES DURING COMMISSIONING OF ETHANE RECOVERY UNIT AT KNPC MAA

摘要

The plant, wholly owned and operated by KNPC Ltd., was designed and constructed by M/s ORTLOFF/ FLUOR / HYUNDAI Corporation, Houston, and has been commissioned Dec-2008. Feed gas originates from the existing lean oil plant. The plant is designed to process 1140 (MMscfd ) of feed gas from Lean Oil Plant (LOP) which contains around 9% of ethane and 1% propane (max.) without any other heavier HC. However some equilibrium amount of lean oil is present in the feed. Plant was operating normal at around 70% capacity, however whenever Ethane recovery level is increased or column operating at the design level, the ovhd system gets cooled as a result of flooding in the top section of the column, which leads to unstable operations. Column was opened for inspection and found no debris. The following studies were carried out to overcome the limitation. 1. Freeze due to moisture slip from driers 2. CO_2 Freeze in the top of the tower 3. Wrong design of column internal 4. Construction debris 5. Benzene freeze or organic material freeze. 6. Change in the mode of operations. We have utilized GPA developed soft ware for estimating the Gas/liquid /solid solubility for identifying the organic component freeze in the plant. This software was very helpful to find out the organic component freeze. In addition to above, GAMMA ray scanning was carried out to identify any problem in the column internals. The various options studied as mentioned above are discussed in this paper.