Oil & Gas

CHS Refinery Repurposes City Wastewater for Cooling

By Troy Dreier, Senior Editor, Compressed Air & Cooling Best Practices Magazine

The CHS oil refinery in McPherson, KS, is a 550-acre facility that processes 100,000 barrels of crude oil per day, consisting of an even mix of sweet crude oil and sour crude oil. Crude is brought in through pipelines and fractionated into gasoline, diesel and a few other products. The refinery also houses a sulfur plant where it produces a liquid agricultural fertilizer called ATS or ammonium thiosulfate, which uses sulfur removed primarily through a process called hydrotreating. 

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Safety Shower Water Tempering Systems Comply with ANSI Z358.1

By Rod Smith, Chiller & Cooling Best Practices Magazine

Chiller & Cooling Best Practices Magazine interviewed Paul Heston (General Manager) and Tom Strock (Chief Engineer) from Hydrothrift Corporation. In a nutshell, where workers are exposed to harmful chemicals, they must have eyewash and safety shower stations to decontaminate themselves in the event of a spill or splash. A variety of industries, including petrochemical, chemical, metal fabrication and laboratories, must plan for this contingency. The ANSI Z358.1 Standard specifies the water used for these purposes must be tepid or within a site-specified range.  This means in colder climates, water must be heated, and in hotter climates water must be cooled.  
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Eliminating Catalyst Cool Down as Critical Path in a Turnaround

By Barney Smith, Turnaround Manager at Aggreko

As with most major process plants, refineries and petrochemical plants periodically need to shut down the entire plant or major portions of it for major maintenance activities. These time periods are referred to as ‘turnarounds’ and are time periods of intense activity. Once the plant shuts down, a considerable amount of money is being spent without any revenue being generated.
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Aggreko Replacement Chiller Restarts a Chemical Plant Within 12 Hours

A Gulf Coast chemical manufacturer of oxo derivative and intermediate products including alcohols, polyols, carboxylic acids, specialty esters, and amines experienced a failure in a critical chiller that shut down its entire Gulf Coast plant. A plant manager estimated a potential financial loss of over $1,000,000 each day the plant was down. The incident occurred over the weekend and there was great concern that locating a replacement chiller with sufficient capacity would be challenging.  
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