Production debottlenecking

As introduced in Section 14.2, bottlenecks in the process facilities can occur at many stages in a producing field life cycle. A process facility bottleneck is caused when any piece of equipment becomes overloaded and restricts throughput. In the early years of a development, production will often be restricted by the capacity of the processing facility to treat hydrocarbons. If the reservoir is performing better than expected it may pay to increase plant capacity. If, however, it is just a temporary production peak such a modification may not be worthwhile. 

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. 

This seems obvious, but it is not always easy to predict how a change in one part of a processing chain will affect the process as a whole (there will always be a bottleneck 

The types of facilities bottleneck which appear late in field life depend upon the reservoir, development scheme and facilities in place. Two of the most common capacity constraints affecting production include  

If extra treatment capacity is not cost effective another option may be to handle the produced water differently. The water treatment process is defined by the production stream and disposal specifications. If disposal specifications can be relaxed less treatment will be required or, a larger capacity of water could be treated. It is unlikely that environmental regulators will tolerate an increase in oil content, but if much of the 

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The capacity of PVA in 1995 was greater than 550,000 t. Several manufacturers have added capacity since 1987. Air Products Chemicals added 40,000 t of new capacity Chang-Chun, Nippon Gohsei, and Hoechst all debottlenecked their plants and a new small plant was built in Korea by Oriental Chemical Industries (10,000 t). 

Plant Operation The purpose is to maintain and improve performance (i.e., product quality, rate, efficiency, safety, and profits). Examples include identification of plant conditions that limit performance (troubleshooting, debottlenecking) and exploration of new operating regions. 

Influent to biotreatment is reduced to 40% of current level. Therefore, the plant production can be expanded 2.5 times the current capacity before the biotreatment facility is debottlenecked again. 

As with troubleshooting, a proper debottlenecking exercise must consider the effects of feedstock, catalyst, operating conditions, mechanical hardware, environmental issues, and the ability of the rest of the refinery to handle the additional feed/product rates and quality. 

Debottlenecking usually results in more feed. Both the main fractionator and the gas plant must be able to recover the incremental product. 

Type (a) maximizes the overall pX production of the complex, while type (b) coproduces additional high purity benzene. Also, type (b) may be a smart solution for debottleneckings of type (a) complexes since it allows a higher feed space velocity than type (a) (see below). 

Japan has a major slice of the ethylene production capacity in the Far East, with nameplate capacity of approximately 23% of the area s total nameplate capacity. Japan has a ethylene production capacity of about 7 million tonnes per year. This nameplate capacity has been stable since the mid-1990s and growth is expected to be modest, mainly by debottlenecking operations. This static growth in capacity is in contrast to most of the other countries in the Far East which have seen large increases in capacity since the latter part of the 1990s. This has resulted in Japan s share of capacity in the Far East falling from 41% in 1995 to about 23% today. 

A simplified heat balance will show what might need to be done to debottleneck a convective (hot gas) dryer, i.e., increase its production rate F. 

Fab operation resembles a commodity chemical factory regarding the need for careful scheduling and debottlenecking. Yield levels typically exceed 90% for virtually all tools hence major productivity and profitability improvements must originate more from optimization of the overall process flow rather than of individual unit operations. " In fact, a typical tool is often in production only about 30% of the time, with the balance falling prey to testing and tuning, set up, scheduled and unscheduled maintenance, and unscheduled shutdowns. The shutdowns include cancelled... 

Acetone Does not azeotrope with water, but when distilled, a large reflux is required to get a half dry product. Pervaporation is ideal for final dehydration or for debottlenecking existing distillation systems. Very often pervaporation and vapor permeation plants are designed for operation with various solvents or with solvent mixtures. 

Existing entrainer distillation systems can also be effectively debottlenecked using pervaporation/vapor permeation (Fig. 15). Normally, the rectification column will be operating to give a product as close to the azeotrope as possible, running with a high reflux. 

To debottleneck the system, reflux in the rectification column is reduced, giving more overhead product, but with a higher water content. The pervaporation unit is sized to remove enough water that the subsequent entrainer column is also unloaded. Both columns can then realize a significant capacity increase. 

Institut Frangais du Petrole (IFP) has developed a process, where pervaporation of methanol is used to debottleneck MTBE production. In the debutanizer columns used in MTBE processing, the MTBE/ methanol azeotrope results in a concentration of methanol at a point midway between the feed tray and the... 

D Amico, V. et al. (2006) Consider new methods to debottleneck clean alkylate production. Hydrocarbon Processing, February, p. 65. 

While the debottlenecking concept has long been practiced on production processes, the idea that research was a process that could be debottlenecked was a somewhat unexpected outcome. Clearly, R D is a much less well-defined process than a production process but the idea that multiple steps must work together and operate at somewhat the same rate helped focus attention on areas in need of improvement. 

N. A. Bhore, R. M. Gould, T. L. Hilbert, M. P. McGuiness, D. McNally, P. H. Smiley, and C. R. Wildemuth, Membranes Debottleneck Lube and Wax Production, Paper LW-99-128, presented at the Lubricants and Waxes meeting of the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, Houston, Texas, November 11-12, 1999. 

In the case of paraffinic feeds, very low pour point products were most economically obtained by using partially solvent dewaxed feedstocks (Table 9.9). It can be seen as well that these are all relatively light lubes. The advantage cited for this approach is that this can debottleneck the solvent dewaxing unit, where throughput becomes very limited when attempting to produce very low pour products. 

The liquid stream from the separator is pumped to the deheptanizer to remove light hydrocarbons. The liquid stream from the deheptanizer overhead contains benzene and toluene, and is sent to distillation section to produce high-purity benzene and toluene products. The liquid stream from the deheptanizer bottoms contains mixed xylenes and a small amount of Cg+ aromatics. This liquid stream is sent to the paraxy-lene (PX) recovery section. The mixed xylenes stream is very low in EB due to high EB conversion in the DX reactor, which debottlenecks the PX recovery unit. 

Complementing or debottlenecking existing extraction units for the production of high-purity aromatics (routing of excess pygas to the APU)... 

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