Furnace Steam Injection

Question

Furnace Steam Injection

hduncan8943 (Chemical)

(OP)

4 Jun 13 18:08

Does anyone inject steam into their crude heater or vacuum heater for online decoking? I am looking for some guidelines on this. I have an old refinery engineering book that may have some rules of thumb, I am curious to current practices. We inject steam into one of our two crude heaters, but none of the vacuum heaters. We may have enough capacity on our overhead/jet system to allow this. Some of our heaters don't get decoked even during turn around. I have seen hot spots on our heater tubes at times which has limited us on charge rate. Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

0707 (Petroleum) · Answer 1 · 2013-06-05 06:07:28

In the past our crude and vacuum heaters were steam air decoked at controlled temperatures with co and co2 analysis. Nowadays the referred heaters are decoked with pigs.

Regards

Luis Marques

hduncan8943 (Chemical) · Answer 2 · 2013-06-05 20:47:05

I thought that I had a reference which used steam only. I did find a new BP technical practice which refers to the steam reaction with carbon producing CO2, CO, and hydrogen. I know that people do the wet steam-air decoking, but we would have to be offline to do this. I am just curious as to how much benefit I would see from steam injection alone. We do use steam injection in one of our small crude heaters.

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Furnace Steam Injection