coker feed

[ioji1]

Dear All,

Have you ever experienced to fed crude oil directly into coker unit, together with vacuum residue?
If yes , please provide me some data related to : coke quality, operating problems ...

Kind regards,
Ioji

 

[TD2K]

Why would you? Typically you recover the usable fractions in the crude oil through the crude and vacuum units until you are left with the short resid. You then feed that to your coker to upgrade it more valuable fractions.

I think I've seen slops disposed of to a coker at times, I would have to check back through some previous jobs to be certain though.

 

[ioji1]

Thanx for your answer.
The reason is that we`ll start after refinery turnaround and, our management ask if it`s possible to reduce catch-up time by feeding some heavy crude into Coker unit.

Regards,
Ioji

 

[owg]

Could you feed the crude to the coker fractionator, that way only the heavy ends would go to the coker. That would likely not mess up the coke too much. You might already have a slop line to the coker fractionator to keep cracked slop out of the crude unit.

HAZOP at

http://www.curryhydrocarbons.ca

 

[TD2K]

I'm not sure how much crude, even heavy crude, you could feed to the coker without totally overloading sections of your coker fractionator and/or your coker gas plant. Coker feed normally has everything pulled out of it from HVGO and up. Even a heavy crude is going to have a lot of naphtha, jet, diesel and gas oils over and above the normal resid.

However, I'm not a coker engineer. Hopefully someone on the site has some more direct experience on these units. Have you a contact with your coker license vendor that you could informally bounce this idea off of?

Rather than crude, is there resid available? Granted that raises the whole question of off-loading, storage, handling etc.

 

[RefinerLink]

I've seen refiners run topped crudes through a coker, but that is very different than whole range crude. Given that your coker was designed for SR resid, i agree with comments above that your equipment can handle whole range crude processing in any considerable amount.

As also noted, i'd be concerned about coke morphology.

So my real question is, if this option is regarding operations post turnaround (i'm assuming this was a planned turnaround), why would this reduce "catch-up" time? Presumably you have a planning department that managed your refinery inventories properly?

In any regard, the whole point of refining is to maximize the margin by processing raw feedstocks. If you put crude through a coker, the refinery product yield will be absolutely horrible. Even though you are reducing feed inventory quicker, you likely won't be making any money doing so.

You should consider commercial options to get into better inventory balance. Even if you sell the crude at a loss, it probably is more economic than running it through a coker. Cokers make coke out of liquid product. Coke = 0 value.