When it comes to improving the energy performance of refineries, most energy services firms focus on improving the performance of energy consuming equipment and systems. This alone is not enough to reduce operating costs.
It is important to study the plant as such and evaluate the performance of the chemical reaction systems and unit operations such as distillation systems, heat exchangers, etc. The opportunities to be evaluated are:
- Optimizing the reaction conditions – Improving the yield of products, minimizing byproduct and waste products
- Potential for conversion from batch to continuous operation
- Debottlenecking of plant equipment or minimizing batch time
- Optimizing product quality in distillation columns for optimum energy consumption, etc.
- Evaluate steam network options such as optimizing let down levels, interchanging of steam turbine drives and electrical power drives, use of low level steam in reboilers, etc.
- Study of heat exchanger network to check for any heat integration opportunities and to eliminate heat transfer across pinch, etc.
- Minimizing ‘quality giveaways’: produce products whose quality parameters meet specifications within a narrow margin.
Hold on; if your process safety performance is a serious threat to your business, then it is time to bring that under control before setting your eyes on the plant performance.
At QPES, we help you to achieve the above objectives. Call us for a no binding free quote on how you can increase your plant performance.