ChE499/599 Design Project

BRIEF PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS MIRI 2011

There are six projects available this year: Project title Vinyl Acetate Monomer Production Plant Clean Liquid Fuel Production from Biomass Design of Biodiesel Plant Design of a Bespoke Oil Refinery Floating LNG Without Closed Loop Hydrocarbon Refrigerant Gas Processing Plant with Acid Gas Treatment No. of groups Hannah Ngu Ling Ngee 2 Yudi Samyudia 2 Tan Yin Ling 2 Hannah Ngu Ling Ngee 2 Tan Yin Ling 2 Yudi Samyudia 2 Academic advisors

Vinyl Acetate Monomer Plant

A Malaysian company has requested you to design a vinyl acetate monomer production plant. It is expected that the plant can produce 150,000 tonnes of vinyl acetate per year with purity of 99.5wt%. Economic justification will have to be conducted to defend the decisions your team made throughout the design. Furthermore, energy and material minimization through reuse and recycling should be conducted.

Clean Liquid Fuel Production from Biomass

The clean liquid fuels can be produced from biomass materials (sustainable) and lignite through either direct liquefaction or indirect liquefaction processes. Reserves of biomass and lignite are abundant in Malaysia. The main difference between naturally occurring petroleum fuels and biomass or lignite (solid fuels) is the deficiency of hydrogen content in solid fuels. Thus, the conversion of solid fuels into liquid fuels mainly involves the addition of hydrogen. Direct liquefaction refers to any process in which hydrogenation of solid fuels is conducted through the direct addition of gaseous hydrogen or through hydrogen donor solvent, at high pressure and temperature. The hydrogenated products will then be fractioned into light, middle, and heavy distillate fractions, with proportions varying depending on the specific process type and the amount of recycle or the residence time liquids spend in reactor vessels. In the Indirect liquefaction, solid fuels are first converted to a synthesis gas (a mixture of H2 and CO) in conventional gasification process, which is then converted over a catalyst to the liquid fuels through commercialized Fischer-Tropsch synthesis or commercialized Mobil Methanol to Gasoline (MTG) Process. In Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, the two gases consisted in synthesis gas recombine over appropriate (usually iron-based) catalyst at high pressure to form a variety of liquid hydrocarbons. The synthesis gas can be produced from solid fuels through either conventional gasification processes or a new gasification process. The Mobil MTG process produces gasoline from solid fuels in two distinct steps. In the first step, synthesis gas is reacted over a copper-based catalyst to produce methanol. In the second step, partial dehydration of methanol to dimethyl ether is carried out over an activated alumina catalyst followed by reaction over a fixed-bed zeolite catalyst which yields 80% of gasoline-boiling range product.

Design of Biodiesel Plant

The current drive towards environmental sustainability, rising cost of petroleumbased fuel price and abundant of biomass waste resources has created a driving force to increase interest in biodiesel. Biodisel is biodegradable, non-toxic and has a more positive combustion emission profile as compared to petroleum-based diesel. You are requested to analyse the feasibility of 30,000 tonnes per annum of biodiesel production. Analysis should includes technological and economical aspects and the plant is expected to produce pharmaceutical grade of glycerol of >99.5 mass%. Furthermore, resources minimization through reuse and recycling should be included. The plant design should also be controllable and operate safely.

Design of a Bespoke Oil Refinery

GHD
Introduction The term Mini Refinery is used to describe refineries in remote locations that provide a means of quickly monetising a limited crude oil resource that allows a rapid production of fuel products. For the purposes of this design project, the term Bespoke Refinery will be used to describe an artificial or hypothetical refinery tailor made for the production of a very limited range of products. For example, there will be no heavy ends treating, no asphalts nor vacuum distillation, no coker, no isomerisation, and no alkylation. So, in this sense, this refinery will not likely be found anywhere in the world. The aim of this design will be to maximise the production of diesel and petrol.

Terminology A variety of terms are used to describe the various fractions of liquids that are produced in a refinery. In your research you may come across these terms. I wish to standardise on the following: Naphtha: equivalent to gasoline/petrol Kerosene and Aviation/Jet Fuel will be equivalent Fuel oil (also called distillate): will be called diesel.

Refinery Products The actual capacity of any plant will depend on the percentages of the fractions of the specific crude processed. Specifically, this plant will be designed for a capacity of 100,000 barrels per day of 35 to 41 API crude. The products from the plant are offgas/LPG, petrol, kerosene and diesel, and residual fuel. Students are expected to carry out research to determine an appropriate source of crude oil that will have relevant compositional fractions that have the potential to provide the greatest recovery of petrol and diesel fractions. Crude oil sourced from the Middle East, Australia, Asia (Thailand) and North America should be investigated.

Refinery Operations Crude oil will be imported into the refinery via an onshore unloading facility. For completeness, students are to design the oil transfer system (pumps and pipeline hydraulic sizing) to the refinery. Assume pipeline length of 5 km. Crude oil storage of 60 days has been planned due to potentially irregular or unreliable supply. The crude storage facility will comprise of floating roof tanks.

The finished products will be stored in fixed / floating tanks. Product storage of approximately 15 days is planned based on a refinery availability of 95%. Tank sizes should be standardized. Smaller tanks for storing chemicals and additives (i.e. MTBE, ethanol, etc.) are also envisaged. Finished products will be dispatched by road and sea.

Refinery Processes The refinery will comprise the following basic operations: 1. Crude distillation tower (including pre-heater). 2. Gas processing stream with amine treating. Fuel gas produced in the processes will be used as refinery fuel gas. Additional fuel may be required over and above the fuel gas generated in the refinery. 3. The petrol fraction will be hydrotreated (term = hydrodesulphurisation) prior to being sent to the reformer unit. Naphtha from atmospheric distillation does not have a sufficiently high octane number. Catalytic Reforming is used for octane upgrading by converting straight chain molecules into unsaturated cyclic and aromatic compounds. In doing so, it liberates a significant amount of byproduct hydrogen that may be used in desulphurisation and saturation reactions elsewhere in the refinery. Catalytic reforming typically uses multiple reactors with platinum catalyst that must be regenerated at set intervals. Sulphur poisons the catalyst; therefore, virtually all sulphur must be removed prior to reforming. 4. Kerosene stream will be treated in a merox (mercaptan oxidation) unit. 5. The diesel fraction will be sent to its own hydrotreater to reduce sulphur content. Students will need to become familiar with latest emissions standards worldwide for sulphur content. 6. No processing of the residual fuel is required.

Floating LNG Without Closed Loop Hydrocarbon Refrigerant

WOODSIDE
Whilst most onshore LNG plants rely upon closed-loop refrigerant systems containing highly flammable hydrocarbons (e.g. propane, ethane, ethylene, methane), in the confined space of an offshore LNG processing facility it is desirable to avoid these refrigerants to make the facility inherently safer. It is also desirable to avoid the need to store a spare charge of liquid refrigerant, since this takes up space upon the vessel and further increases the total inventory of flammable hydrocarbons. Finally heat exchangers containing two-phase evaporating refrigerants may be affected by the motion of a floating facility. For these reasons the ideal liquefaction cycle would use some combination of the following: Vapour phase refrigerants (e.g. nitrogen) in a reverse Brayton cycle, i.e. using turboexpanders. Open loop systems that use the natural gas itself as the refrigerant, and therefore do not require any refrigerant storage. The challenge is to use a safer liquefaction system whilst achieving a thermal efficiency reasonably close to conventional onshore systems. The FLNG vessel will accompany another offshore facility (either a platform or another floating facility) that will take care of all of the drilling, primary separation of liquid, condensate storage and loading. The FLNG vessel only needs to accept the gas coming from the other facility, process it to make LNG which would be stored onboard and loaded to LNG carriers. At the end of field life, the FLNG vessel will be able to move to another field to partner another facility.

Gas Processing Plant with Acid Gas Treatment

CHEVRON
The project will revolve around the design of a gas processing facility including acid gas removal and treatment to meet environmental and health/safety requirements. It can be assumed that the gas plant is located on or near the Australian coast and is receiving gas from a point approximately 100 km offshore the North West.