If you ever find yourself having to mitigate a plugged reactor scenario with the unit online, this oil refinery blog is here to provide tips on helping you out. Hydroprocessing units are critical today, and having a fouled reactor can significantly reduce refinery production.

While there are numerous reasons why a reactor may have higher than normal pressure drop, this article provides you with a guide on how to manage your unit operations to buy extra runlength time. You can likely increase runlength anywhere between several weeks to many months using the reactor pressure drop mitigation steps below, in which this extra time can help your refinery Save Millions of Dollars!

Here are 5 Proven Techniques that can alleviate reactor pressure drop issues and do not require a full unit shutdown:

Chemical Injections:

Use of chemical injection is typically the first step that many refiners take when managing reactor pressure drop issues since it normally can be performed on the run without affecting unit production. There are two primary drivers for using a chemical injection:

Stop reactor pressure drop from increasing Alleviate existing pressure drop constraints Depending on the root cause of the reactor fouling, you can use a dispersant or coagulant to manage existing organic or inorganic fouling – chemical injections can also be used to minimize impacts of oxygen ingression. Many process service companies (such as Baker Hughes and Nalco) provide a suite of chemical agents tailored for your needs. Just be cautious that many times an injection quill may be needed near your reactor inlet in order for chemical injection to properly work.

Call it what you wish – 6 Oil, Fuel Oil, RSFO, HSFO, LSFO, or even Burner Oil. The one thing that’s certain is that if your refinery produces this product, you likely have wide room for improving how you optimize fuel oil blend operations.
Desipite all the talk these days about investment requirements needed to meet IMO Regulatory changes, let's ensure that we're minimizing the inefficiencies in our current business.
Many refiners make the mistake of ignoring fuel oil optimization since the specs are not complicated. Refiners would rather focus on gasoline or diesel blend optimization. But let me tell you, there’s likely more money to be made by focusing energy on fuel oil blending than any other product.

When it comes to optimizing refinery bunker blending, there is one spec to focus on - viscosity. There are other specs such as flash, API, sulfur and metals, but the big opportunity for refiners is viscosity. As a rule of thumb, my advice generally is to maximize the gasoil/resid cutpoint and then use distillate to cut the remaining resid.

Maximizing gasoil recovery from resid makes a lot of sense since refiners can crack gasoils into gasoline and distillates. Gasoil is also a very poor cutting agent, so higher fuel oil production results from leaving gasoil in resid. This cutpoint giveaway can be worth $0.5 Million per year for 1 KBD fuel oil production or $5 Million per year for 10 KBD fuel oil production.

Most refiners understand the value in maximizing the gasoil/resid cutpoint. However, a subtle variable not often accounted for is the quality of fuel oil cutter. Like any other blend parameter, bunker oil cutter optimization requires deep technical scrutiny to capture maximum benefits. However, it’s a fact that many refiners meet fuel oil specs with minimum effort.
Let’s take a quick look at some fuel oil blends and get a feel for how much volume is required for different cutter streams.