Gasoline-producing refinery units, treating area, and tank farm at dusk — Larger plant projects; our work sits on the production equipment inside them.

Trains in the field

Projects

A refinery project is bigger than any one vendor. Civil, tanks, power, and offsites belong to other scopes. We take the production slices: the column that sets naphtha quality, the reactor that lets gasoline meet sulfur, the treating block after the cracker.

The cases below are those slices. Each plant had a wider program. Our influence was the process equipment that decides whether rundown is finished gasoline or rework, and whether the unit can hold rate when the crude slate moves.

Work starts from assays, plot limits, and the metallurgy sour service actually needs. When a file opens, a named lead owns the register so fabrication and the site crew are looking at the same drawings.

Coastal atmospheric crude distillation unit — Coastal atmospheric crude unit, two-pass column and exchanger bay.

Coastal atmospheric crude unit

The plant needed a heavier, sourer slate without replacing the atmospheric column. Production was already losing naphtha quality: the cut arriving at the reformer was too heavy, and pumparound exchangers were the bottleneck. The wider project covered docks, tankage, and a vacuum-unit study. Our file was the production path inside the existing shell.

We revamped trays and selected exchangers on a two-pass atmospheric column so the naphtha endpoint stayed inside the window treating and reforming were designed for. Heat recovery was rebalanced so fired-heater duty did not climb just to keep rate. After the turnaround, the unit could still yield a gasoline-relevant cut instead of pushing off-spec naphtha into tankage.

Our slice: column internals, pumparounds, and the rundown exchangers that set naphtha quality. Not the jetty, not crude tankage.

Naphtha hydrotreater reactor, charge heater, and compressor package — Naphtha hydrotreater reactor, charge heater, and recycle compressor.

Naphtha hydrotreater package

A Midwest crude unit was sending a heavier sour naphtha into gasoline blending. Sulfur would have stranded the reformer catalyst and the finished-gasoline spec together. The site program included hydrogen makeup and amine treating at the fence. Our production piece was the hydrotreater as one mechanical package.

Reactor, charge heater, and recycle compressor were specified together, with internals and quench set against the worst naphtha the crude side was allowed to send. Baskets, outlet collectors, and compressor capacity were written so recycle would still hold when the feed got darker. Production kept a path from naphtha to reformer without a second treating pass.

Our slice: hydrotreater reactor, charge heater, recycle compressor, and internals. Hydrogen plant and amine regeneration sat with others.

FCC gasoline treating

After the cat cracker, cracked naphtha was rich in sulfur and still needed for octane in the gasoline pool. A blanket hydrotreat would have met sulfur and starved barrels. The larger project rebuilt parts of the FCC complex. Our influence was the treating and sulfur-recovery tie-ins that let production keep those octane barrels in the blend.

Amine contactors, rich-lean exchangers, and the hookup to sulfur recovery were specified so blended gasoline could clear sulfur without sending the whole cracked stock back through severe treating. The production result is a pool that still has octane, and a fence line that still has a place for the H2S that came out of the naphtha.

Our slice: gasoline treating equipment and sulfur-recovery tie-ins after the FCC. The cracker itself was another contractor’s unit.

A file like these

Bring the production slice

If your project has a column, reactor, or treating block that decides gasoline rate, send the process data. We will tell you what part of it we can own.

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