Good Hope Refinery

On January 23, 1983, the Good Hope Refinery was shut down. 

It was too bad about the blue fish. It was too bad that I didn t understand about the air, or the filter, or the water flow. It was really bad because I have a master s degree in chemical engineering. It was bad because I was the technical manager of the process division of the Good Hope Refinery in Louisiana. Mostly, it was bad because I had been designing process equipment for 16 years, and didn t understand how water circulated through my son s aquarium. 

Expansion loop Piping thermally expands as it gets hot. Allowance must be made for the growth in pipe length, otherwise the pipe will break by cracking at its welds. We burned down a fractionator at the Good Hope Refinery because of such an omission. 

Contract maintenance workers often will not replace the tray manways unless the tray manway is adjacent to a tower external manway. They reason that once the tray manways that are visible from the tower manway are closed, there is no way for someone to inspect the other trays. This problem is not just common— it is imiversal. The maintenance force at the Good Hope Refinery pulled this nasty trick on me at the coker fractionator. Equipped with my crescent wrench, I opened the tray internal manway below the side tower manway. 1 discovered that the 12 trays below this point had their manways stacked in their downcomers. In 1990,1 worked on a project to improve fractionation at the Chevron Refinery crude distillation unit in El Segundo, California. When the tower was opened to implement my design, the tray manways were found lying on the tray decks below the diesel draw tray. The lesson is, inspect each tray and then witness the closure of each tray manway, separately. 

In Chap. 23 we reviewed several problems pertaining to steam jet precondenser and intercondenser problems. The surface condensers, which serve condensing steam turbines, are subject to all the same problems and a lot more. A standard surface condenser package with an associated two-stage jet system is shown in Fig. 25.3. By way of summarizing many of the problems that occur with this sort of equipment, I will relate my trials and tribulations with K-805, an auxiliary combustion air blower at the Good Hope Refinery in Norco, Louisiana (now Valero). 

Overfilling a flare K.O. drum is a serious matter. Liquid hydrocarbons may erupt from the flare like a giant flame-thrower. My secretary ran out of the Good Hope Refinery without her shoes when our flare stack overflowed. Burning liquid butane erupting from the Amoco Oil flare in Whiting, Indiana, was reported as a missile laimch by a spy satellite. 

Also, the emissions of uncombusted hydrogen sulfide vapors (HjS) to the atmosphere could also be (although more remotely) a potential safety issue. This happened at the Good Hope Refinery where 1 worked in 1981, when reports of noxious odors were reported from a local high school. Our plant manager appeared on the television news to assure the community that while the H S odor was bad, it was not in the least harmful to the children. 

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