Processing Lower Cost Crudes With Greater Confidence and Improved Reliability
Published in Inspectioneering Journal July|August 2020
by Gerrit Buchheim, Winston Robbins and Frank Sapienza
For more than 100 years, it has been understood in the petroleum refining industry that certain crude oils—or, more accurately, crude oil fractions—contain sulfur (S) species and levels of organic acids that may be very corrosive to equipment and piping in crude distillation and downstream units. Economic pressures on the refining industry are forcing many refiners to look at lower-priced high acid or opportunity crudes to improve margins. The challenge for the integrity management community is how to evaluate the effects of a crude on the equipment metallurgy installed and subsequent impact on equipment reliability. The benefits of having a more accurate crude corrosion model are large in that it allows a refinery to potentially process cheaper crudes for increased profitability with greater confidence and better anticipation and understanding of the potential damage to the equipment/piping.
Some operating companies have focused research on this subject individually or through several joint industry programs (JIPs), but current methods available to most refiners still struggle to accu-rately predict corrosion behavior in refinery streams on a consis-tent basis.
This article presents a new simultaneous S/TAN model combined with a superior flow model (SNAPS-TAC) to better predict the corrosivity of hot crude oil streams…
