Meet Mr. Distillation | RefinerLink
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Meet Mr. Distillation

By Ralph Laurel

Dec 13, 2015
 

Most refiners over-emphasize utilization and forget about yields. Many of those who are aware of yields tend to focus on conversion, but not distillation. In the end, separation quality is an important area of oil refining that many neglect.

 
 

Meet Mr. Distillation.  He’s the guy just looking to hand you some money at your refinery.  He’s taking care of business day in and day out and you’re taking him for granted.  He’s separating molecules and trying to send them to the right places but you’re really not giving him much help. 

 

He’s in your crude unit, your gas plants, your FCC unit, your Alky, and even your Coker unit (I’m serious! Even in the Coker!).  He hangs out in almost every part of your refinery.  He’s got ways to shift jet into gasoline or jet into diesel.  He’s able to get light cycle oil out of FCC bottoms, propane out of fuel gas, and that crazy guy can even get valuable isobutane molecules out of normal butane.   

 

Every refinery focuses on things like feed rates and reactor temperatures but forget that those things mean nothing if you don’t recover the product molecules in the right streams.  What good is the fancy new expensive FCC catalyst you’re paying for if all that extra distillate is getting dropped in your fractionators down to FCC bottoms?

 

All that extra crude rate you’re running? Doesn’t matter one bit if poor fractionation is resulting in gasoil molecules being lost in resid.  Even the less thought about products like propane can improve profitability if recovered out of fuel gas.  And don’t forget about getting isobutane out of normal butane.  That extra isobutane is more valuable AND you’ll be able to blend a higher volume of butane in mogas.

 

 

That Mr. Distillation is an important dude.  

 

He doesn’t ask for much.  A little extra reflux, maybe some extra duty on the reboilers, but most of all he just requires some thought.  There’s a high probability that if you picked out one of the fractionation towers in your refinery there’s an easy way to improve its performance. 

 

So start paying some attention to Mr. Distillation… because chances are he’s got a lot more money to hand out. Learn more about Distillation Troubleshooting should your curiosity have been piqued.

 
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  • :   Dear Mr Distillation can you contact me opaultes@live.fr thanks

    Jul 13, 2012

  • :   Would like to hear more about distillation in a discussion group.

    Jul 13, 2012

  • :   Mr Distillation, do you have a blog thread on this site. I would like to ask you some questions. Thanks

    Apr 26, 2014

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