I remember my first assignment loading a PSA, Pressure Swing Adsorption, unit for a Gulf Coast Refinery. I barely knew what a refinery was let alone the purpose of a PSA-isn’t that terrible? I managed to get through the assignment and received an outstanding review from company’s client. Loading a PSA isn’t that difficult-you just dump the adsorbent in there! But at the time I was intimidated because I only vaguely understood that it allows refiners to purify hydrogen, the life’s blood of many refinery technologies, or other gas streams.
This blog is intended to be a crash course in refining. A sort of “things I wished I’d known then”, if you will. Who am I and what do I know about refining you may ask? I’m, Audrey, a refinery process engineer and never enough is the answer to the latter question. As anyone in the business will tell you, there’s always something more you can learn. I began my career starting up various technologies, e.g. hydroprocessing, adsorptive separation, and isomerization units, at refineries around the world. That means after a refinery technology is built by a Foster Wheeler, Bechtel, or a Technip (the engineering design contractors or EPC’s as they’re referred to-Engineering, Procurement, Construction), I went onsite as the Commissioning Engineer to help refiners cut in feed (begin processing crude oil or, if further downstream, a crude oil derivative like naphtha or distillate in the unit). Essentially my job was to technically assist refinery staff in getting the unit up and in operation to ultimately produce on specification product(s). I did that for a few years until I realized I was about to be disowned by friends and family because they only saw me 2 days out of the year. Now I work as a process engineer for an engineering consulting firm in Houston.
Petroleum refining is the upgrading or manufacturing of crude oils or crude oil derivatives into lighter, more useful products like gasoline and plastic soda bottle precursors. I call this blog “Boiling Oil” because that is exactly what petroleum refiners do-separate a mixture of multiple types hydrocarbon molecules via distillation (boiling) or other processes such as thermal cracking (heating up molecules until they break apart), catalytic reforming (passing hydrocarbons over catalysts to get them to change their shape or react with other molecules), or other separation techniques like adsorptive separation or liquid-liquid extraction.
Refineries at first seem to be these huge complicated industrial complexes that are difficult to understand. Actually, most refining processes are fairly easy to gain a working knowledge of and after your first few technologies you’ll realize that all refining processes are arranged and behave quite similarly. There’s a feed preparation section to clean up or preheat the feed, followed by the heart of the process reforming or thermal cracking for instance, and a fractionation (distillation) section to separate the newly created products.
Anyway, that’s a just a brief introduction to this blog. I’ll try to keep it fairly tech light for the laymen curious but accurate for professionals so please let me know if I head in the wrong direction or put complete and utter crap out there. As I said-I’m always learning.
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