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Category: Outlook & Reviews

Happy new decade?

A New Year is typically a time for taking stock, for looking back at the year just gone, and thinking about the year to come. This year of course marks a bigger transition, from the 2010s to the 2020s. The past decade has been a volatile one, existing under the shadow of the global financial crisis of 2008-09, from which the world was still just emerging in 2010. Over the past decade, ‘quantitative easing’ has helped prevent deflation and driven a decade long stock market rally, but also kept both public and private debt levels high, as interest rates stay low. Weaning the global economy off QE has proved to be far more difficult than many anticipated.

Hydrocarbon removal from sour water systems

Hydrocarbon contamination of sour water streams feeding sour water strippers is a well-known challenge in the refining and gas processing industry. The source of this challenge is the formation of a stable oil emulsion in an aqueous phase that may contain both H 2 S and NH 3 . The typical approach to the problem involves large residence time tanks with the assumption that droplet settling will occur over a long enough time frame. In practice, droplet settling is very slow due to a variety of reasons, and as a result, operators encounter sour water heat exchanger fouling, stripper fouling, hydrocarbon excursions to sulphur recovery units along with other operating challenges. M. Thundyil, D. Seeger and E. McIntosh of Transcend Solutions present a case study of the TORSEP™ oil and solids removal system for contamination removal from a sour water feed stream. The case study illustrates the effect on heat exchanger fouling along with the effect of the variation of several system parameters on operating performance and economics.