As equipment ages and reaches end of useful life, the opportunity arises with necessary replacement to include enhancements or upgrades at little additional cost.

With higher anticipated charge rates at the coker due to IMO, what are your best practices around defoamer application to minimize impact on hydrotreater catalyst life?

Sodium in the coker feed can be introduced via sodium content of the salts in crude, caustic addition at the crude unit for corrosion control purposes, as a contaminant in recovered oil material in the refinery, sodium content of other purchased feedstocks (as mentioned in the question) among others.

What strategies (operational, technological, logistical) do you consider for slurry streams that will not meet the IMO specifications?

Caustic is injected with the crude charge on some units to reduce chlorides in the crude overhead system and impact the salting and corrosion potential.

The first thing to consider is the fourth stage collector. For designs that re-introduce the collected fines downstream of the expander, a fourth stage collector with fines removal and filter on the TSS underflow gas will aid in reducing PM.

Sunoco currently has a particulate matter (PM) analyzer in one location on the stack of a Wet Gas Scrubber. It is there to measure Filterable PM only, not particle size distribution. This was installed as a requirement of a local environmental permit.

Several Grace customers successfully operate with NOx emissions less than 20 ppm in full combustion without the use of NOx removal hardware in the flue gas circuit.

E-cat and ESP hopper fines are either send to a cement kiln or land filled. Fines captured by the Wet Gas Scrubber are also land filled. Metals limits are normally for leachable metals as measured by the TCLP (Toxicity Characteristic Leaching Procedure) testing, as opposed to total metals in the catalyst.

When designing an FCC catalyst, one must consider coke selectivity, delta coke and total coke yield. Coke selectivity is the relative coke-making tendency of the catalyst, or in other words, a catalyst with good coke selectivity produces higher conversion per unit of coke make than the reference catalyst.