INDUSTRY
Addressing Efficiency Challenges Faced by the Oil and Gas Industry By: Arun Mote
T
he global oil and gas industry is facing challenges due to modern energy processes. This is leading the industry to scout for technologies that maximize the energy efficiency of the production process. This drastically helps petroleum refineries and chemical and petrochemical plants to reduce their carbon footprint and operating costs. In order to be competitive and constantly evolving, end-users want to achieve plant efficiency enhancement through energy-recovery technologies to reduce energy waste. In this context, steam turbines play a vital role in achieving that goal, from driving powergeneration turbines in an old generation refinery to driving almost all rotating equipment starting from 10 kW in a modern-day refinery. Triveni’s pre-qualification with OEMs, EPCs and consultants augmented its capabilities, starting from pre-order feed engineering to one-time supply and installation of API steam turbines. Through its innovative product portfolio and aftermarket services, it has been helping companies manage their power and drive solutions in various areas, such as petroleum refineries, petrochemicals, chemicals, fertilizers, steel, cement, process co-generation and many more, globally. With the introduction of modular design concepts and implementation of its steam turbines, Triveni Turbines is fully equipped to meet the multiple operating scenarios of its customers and to address the challenges and ever-changing needs of tomorrow: • Flexibility in terms of design and engineering and special capability for “made to order” turbines • Capability to comply with stringent design codes • All steam turbines manufactured by Triveni Turbines are subjected to live steam trials • A large network of technical field advisors supervise the installation and commissioning of steam turbines anywhere in the world
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• Faster delivery period of steam turbines owing to high throughput from two world-class manufacturing facilities • Benchmark after sales and post warranty support for annual maintenance, operation and maintenance, lifetime support for spares. Requirements of Steam and Usage of Steam Turbine in the Oil and Gas Industry As the world is moving toward more energyefficient ways of operation, most licensors and designers of modern petroleum refineries and chemical and petrochemical plants are having to keep this in mind. As a result, steam balancing and extreme utilisation of steam becomes a key design factor. This has put pressure on existing plants to look at their steam headers for available steam and increase utilization by replacing pressurereducing stations and dump condensers with steam turbines to save their electrical power and reduce their carbon footprint. In the past few decades, this pushed steam turbine manufacturers to adapt to various levels of steam conditions ranging from very lowpressure steam inlets (4 Bar) to supercritical steam (140 Bar) and power ranging from 10 kW and up to 30 MW or more according to the plant size. Triveni’s expertise in handling high-pressure and low-pressure steam helps the end-users recover energy from various steam headers by completely eliminating the pressure-reducing stations and dump condensers. Challenges Faced by the Oil and Gas Industry Challenge 1: High cyclic loads and the utilization of multiple pressure steam into a single steam turbine Many chemical plants have cyclic loads by virtue of the processes involved in manufacturing the end product. Certain exothermic reactions occur in the course of chemical manufacturing that can generate steam at a lower pressure and temperature than is normally vented or dumped in a condenser since they are not generated continuously.
Triveni offers injection – condensing/injection – back-pressure steam turbines where the intermittent generation of steam can be injected into the turbine to add more flow to the low pressure (LP) section of the turbine generating more power at the terminal. Triveni’s steam turbines are equipped with new generation speed – load – extraction control electronic governing systems that can provide a seamless operation to benefit the user. Challenge 2: Utilizing unconventional header pressures (VHP to HP and LP to Condensing) Triveni Turbines provided one of its customers (a mid-scale petroleum refinery overseas) with energy savings by offering very high pressure (VHP) to high pressure (HP) turbine drive solutions. This saved them almost 17 MW of electrical power, an enormous power cost savings. With these design capabilities, a steam turbine manufacturer can increase the extent of variable adaptation. By doing so, all sizes of critical equipment like process pumps, water pumps, small lube pumps, fans, blowers, air compressors and process compressors, etc. can be driven by steam, thus enhancing the saving of energy (by reducing losses during generation, transmission and utilization) and steam utilization. Case Study 1: Turbine Details: 4 X 1.5MWe & 4 X 2.7MWe steam turbines as per API 612 + Shell DEP (Design Engineering Practices) + AMEC FW project variations
2.7MW Steam Turbine
