Bottlenecks debottlenecking

As a field matures, bottlenecks may appear in other areas, such as water treatment or gas compression processes, and become factors limiting oil or gas production. These issues can often be addressed both by surface and subsurface options, though the underlying justification remains the same the NPV of a debottlenecking exercise (net cost of action versus the increase in net revenue) must be positive. 

Demethanizer Overhead Expander and Multifeed Fractionation. Incorporation of an expander into the conventional high pressure demethanizer system eliminates bottlenecks in the refrigeration system, the demethanizer condenser, and charge gas compressor. It reduces the cost by lowering the refrigeration power. Multiple feed deethanization and ethylene fractionation debottlenecks the deethanizer, ethylene fractionator, and the refrigeration systems, thereby reducing power consumption. 

Equipment bottlenecks and some insight into the value of debottlenecking... 

Debottlenecking often refers to hardware changes, small or large. It is directed at the bottlenecks identified during optimization. It includes projects that cannot be completed online, such as installing new internals in a vessel. Debottlenecking is the main focus of this chapter. 

Now, consider a different situation. It is necessary to determine how much scale-up is possible for the process for which you are responsible. You determine that one process unit can be scaled up only by 10%, whereas all other process units can be scaled up by at least 15%. The process unit that can be scaled up only by 10% is called a bottleneck. Elimination of this bottleneck is called debottlenecking and involves determining how to remove obstacles limiting process changes. 

For the problem in Section 19.3. it was determined that the pump in the Dowtherm A loop could handle only 5% increased flow, which allowed only 2% increased reactor operation. Within the reactor portion of the allyl chloride process, the pump is identified as the bottleneck. From the perspective of the entire process, assuming that all other units can be scaled up by more than 5%, the Dowtherm A loop is the bottleneck. In Section 19.3. it was shown that by operating the two reactor heat-exchange coils in parallel, the reactor could be scaled up by 15%. Altering configuration of the reactor heat-exchange coils is the act of debottlenecking the process. For this problem, it can be shown that additional scale-up in the reactor... 

Traditionally for debottlenecking studies of smelters and oflier process plants, a mass balance is performed based on continuous operating rates and ejqtected operating hours. Smelters have several points of failure that will restrict, if not take the entire plant offline. By using a more detailed model, validated against plant experience, bottlenecks can be demonstrated and strategies to remove them to increase plant availability and economic. 

Debottlenecking projects that involve installation of additional equipment provide an opportunity for batch size increases that can lead to substantial throughput increase. More specifically, if the size of the new reactor (R-103) is selected to accommodate the needs of the most demanding vessel procedure (based on volumetric utilization) in a way that shifts the batch size bottleneck to another procedure, then that creates an opportunity for batch size increase. Additional information on debottlenecking and throughput increase options can be found in the literature [140, 141]. 

Liz, Jerry, Mike, and I were partners in expanding the capacity of a naphtha reformer plant producing aromatic base stocks. The bottleneck was the reboiled de-ethanizer, limited by flooding. Our job was to produce a process design to debottleneck the reformer from... 

---