STUDY ON THE MODIFICATION OF CRUDE OIL DISTILLATION PROCESS SYSTEM DUE TO INCREASED CAPACITY AND CHANGE OF FEED CHARACTERISTIC

• Main Author: Cahyanto, Harry
• Format: Theses
• Language: Indonesia
• Subjects: Teknik kimia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/58845
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

Indonesia needs to increase fuel oil produced from refining process of crude oil. The limitation of existing refineries causes Indonesia still to import crude and fuel oil from abroad. Building a new refinery will require a very large investment cost, so increasing the capacity of existing system is more economical solution. The increase in capacity will increase the furnace duty, while the furnace has limitations. Therefore, it is necessary to study the increase in processing capacity along with energy savings in the furnace. In this research, a scenario has been examined that the system will increase its capacity by 20% and get crude oil with lighter fraction. The changes of feed characteristics will change furnace duty and the hydraulic condition in distillation column, thus will increase the possibility of bottlenecking in operation. Analysis on the effect of these feed changes has been carried out and then attempted to modify the configuration of the existing crude oil distillation system. The proposed configuration that has been studied is the addition of a pre-flash column unit before the furnace and followed by modification of heat exchanger network. Analysis in this research has been performed using Aspen Hysys v.11. From the simulation results that have been carried out, the proposed configuration has been shown to increase the processing capacity of the crude oil refining system by 20% without increasing the furnace load and changing product quality. In addition, the new configuration can also make the main column performance better and get more light fraction products. Economic studies that have been carried out have also shown that to create a new scheme it requires a capital cost of around 5.2 million USD and a payback period of 2.55 years. The results of this study conclude that the proposed new scheme is feasible to be implemented.