95
November
2016
HYDROCARBON
ENGINEERING
W
ith the potential to lose up to
US$1.5 million a day due to process
cutbacks or shutdowns, any refinery knows
that a loss in hydrogen supply is bad news.
Yet it is not uncommon. Just this summer, for example, a
fire caused by a heater tube failure in a hydrogen unit at
Phillips 66's Lake Charles refinery in Louisiana resulted in
temporary shutdown.
Of course, if a hydrogen plant goes down, it will, in
turn, result in a loss of steam generation, with major
knock-on effects for the entire refinery process – the
recent loss of steam and resulting shutdown of the
hydrocracking unit at Marathon Petroleum Corporation’s
Galveston Bay refinery in Texas is a case in point.
Such risks – and week upon week of potential
multi-million dollar losses – are not a scenario that any
refinery wants to contemplate, and it is perhaps this,
above all else, that is driving the trend to buy in a more
reliable hydrogen supply, rather than produce the
hydrogen on site.
There has been a growing movement amongst Western refineries to purchase rather
than produce hydrogen, a trend now also emerging in the Middle East, India and Asia.
Phil Morris, Air Products, UK,
explains what is driving this shift in approach.
