PetroChina Co. Ltd.—the publicly listed arm of state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC)—has completed a project to retrofit an existing pressure-swing adsorption (PSA) unit at subsidiary CNPC Guangxi Petrochemical Co.’s 10 million-tonne/year Qinzhou integrated refining complex in China’s Gaungxi province with proprietary process technology from Honeywell UOP LLC.
Newly upgraded with UOP’s Polybed PSA technology, the revamped unit now supplies hydrogen at 99.9% purity and with increased hydrogen recovery for the complex’s hydrotreating units, which use the hydrogen to extract impurities from feedstock, UOP said.
Selected by CNPC Guangxi Petrochemicals for its effectiveness at addressing several issued faced by Chinese manufacturers—including low recovery rates and purity, control-valve leakage, and poor or inconsistent performance—the PSA process uses proprietary UOP adsorbents to remove impurities at high pressure from hydrogen-containing process streams to enable recovery of high-purity hydrogen for use in other refining processes.
This latest revamp for CNPC Guangxi Petrochemical follows installation of a previous UOP Polybed unit for the operator in 2014, the service provider said.
UOP disclosed neither the value of the project nor a capacity of the revamped unit.
Alongside recovering and purifying hydrogen from steam reformers and refinery off gases, the Polybed PSA system can be used to produce hydrogen from other sources such as ethylene off gas, methanol off gas, and partial-oxidation synthesis, UOP said.
Contact Robert Brelsford at [email protected].
