Minimisation of water consumption: the case of an oil refinery
Special Symposium - EPIC-1: European Process Intensification Conference - 1
EPIC-1: Poster Session (EPIC - Poster) - P1
Keywords: reuse, WSD, water
Nowadays water is becoming a valued resource due to its lack. Consequently, it is necessary to control its use. Contamination of water causes reduction of its availability, mainly to underground water. Then specific legislations have been elaborated, and studies on the better use of water have been enlarging significantly.
Based on that, many methodologies were proposed aiming to minimise water consumption. In this work, the heuristic algorithmic procedure Water Sources Diagram (WSD) was applied for targeting the minimum process water consumption in a Brazilian oil refinery in cases involving the presence of multiple contaminants in water streams by means of its reuse and recycling.
This study refers to the utility system of an oil refinery due to its large consumption of water, almost 90% of the total consumption. The system consists of water treatment station, steam generation, catalytic cracking, cooling towers, petroleum desalination and efluent treatment station.
Considering three contaminants (chloride, ammonia, phenol) and pH as controlled parameters, a new mass exchange network was proposed with a reduction in water consumption from 43,4 t/h to 35,1 t/h in the simplified flowchart. In the real case of the oil refinery analised the water consumption was decreased from 150 t/h to 141,7 t/h, which represents a reduction of 5,53%.
Since the water flowrates in an oil refinery are elevated, an economic analysis based in data taken from the literature was carried out. It was found a cost reduction of US$ 56,8 million dollars/year. This shows the efficiency and applicability of WSD methodology.
Presented Wednesday 19, 13:30 to 14:40, in session EPIC-1 Poster Session (EPIC - Poster) - P1.
