Jan-2025
Crystaphase optimisation helped refiner achieve up to double runtime and throughput (NARTC 2025)
Not long after a summer turnaround, a major Gulf Coast refinery had a problem.
Austin Schneider
Crystaphase
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Article Summary
The engineering team noticed a pressure drop (dP) increase in bed 1 of their hydrocracker pretreat reactor shortly after start-up, all but guaranteeing they would not meet their cycle length goal without performing a mid-cycle skim. The site’s challenges did not end there. A year later, they experienced an unexpected two-hour equipment shutdown. Upon restart, the team observed a dP increase in bed 2 while the state of bed 1 continued to worsen.
The engineers had little time to dream about extending the cycle length; they needed just to keep the reactor online and running at the required rates. As in most refineries, the hydrocracker needed to deliver consistently high throughput for stable operations and to meet demand.
The refinery’s engineers knew that the increased pressure drop could limit the hydrocracker’s performance. With their standard configuration, which utilised traditional grading, the runtimes were short. Downtime from mid-cycle skims reportedly ranged from 20 to 60 days. At high-complexity facilities, disruptions like these can seriously impact availability, profitability, and risk associated with turnaround and maintenance operations.
Having worked with Crystaphase to solve tough challenges at other locations, the engineers turned to the company‘s filtration technologies to deliver results with a novel, empirically based solution to a common reactor problem: pressure drop due to crust layer formation.
Working with the site’s process engineer, Crystaphase collected samples from two previous cycles to analyse and better understand the reactor’s foulant profile. After lab analysis of these samples, the Crystaphase team identified the foulants that appeared most likely to be contributing to pressure drop.
Tailored solution
From this detailed analysis, Crysta- phase’s process and development engineer, Umakant Joshi, and director of technology, Austin Schneider, developed a tailored solution that could optimise the reactor’s configuration. Following the next mid-cycle skim of the hydrocracker pretreat reactor, Crystaphase installed an ActiPhase® TRANS solution designed with enough capacity to reach the next scheduled changeout, about one year later, without dP limitations.
With the system installed, the customer met that goal. When the reactor was shut down for a scheduled full catalyst changeout, the customer installed an optimised ActiPhase system designed, together with Crystaphase, to extend the cycle length even further. Over the duration of that cycle, the reactor suffered several unrelated setbacks, including equipment failures. Despite all of these events, the pressure drop remained virtually flat after each restart.
Through the mid-point of the hydrocracker’s first complete cycle (Cycle 1) with the Crystaphase solution, the pressure drop appeared to remain effectively flat. Given the impressive results, the customer approached Crystaphase to see if the system could continue past its next scheduled shutdown. Due to their work with the customer and understanding of the reactor’s foulant profile, the Crystaphase team could turn to their data modelling capabilities for a projection of the pressure drop over the next year. The customer received some good news: the system would likely continue to perform without dP limitations over an extended cycle.
The projection from Crystaphase was accurate, and when Cycle 1 completed, the hydrocracker’s runtime and throughput doubled with the Crystaphase optimisation. Since the completion of Cycle 1, other successful cycles have followed, with Crystaphase optimisations assisting. The most recently completed run was a full cycle without a pressure drop increase, shutting down at approximately 80% of the Cycle 1 runtime. The current cycle is on track to repeat the performance of Cycle 1, once again doubling the cumulative throughput.
Conclusion
With the guidance and technology of Crystaphase, operation has become much more stable over the long term, and pressure is no longer an imminent threat to the refinery’s cycle goals.
This short article originally appeared in the 2025 NARTC Newspaper, which you can VIEW HERE
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