MOSCOW (MRC) -- Honeywell's UOP announced today that PetroChina Guangxi Petrochemical Co. (GXPC) is using UOP process technology to purify hydrogen at a new refining complex in Qinzhou, Guangxi Province, said Hydrocarbonprocessing.

 

With support from UOP's local service team, GXPC successfully commissioned a UOP Polybed PSA (Pressure Swing Adsorption) system to purify hydrogen, which is a critical ingredient used in modern refining processes to produce clean transportation fuels, including diesel, gasoline and jet fuel. 

 

GXPC is subsidiary of PetroChina, one of China's largest state-owned enterprises. Refineries use hydrogen to convert heavy oils to lighter, higher-value products such as transportation fuels. Hydrogen is also used to remove contaminants and improve the quality of end products. 

 

The PSA unit at GXPC processes feed from a steam reformer to produce more than 140,000 Nm3/h (normal cubic meters per hour) of hydrogen.  In addition to PSA technology, GXPC is also using several other UOP technologies to produce high-quality fuels, including: CCR Platforming technology, two-stage Unicracking technology, Unionfining technology, hydrotreating technology, Penex technology, and fluid catalytic cracking technology. 

 

Since UOP commercialized the first small, four-bed hydrogen PSA system in 1966, the company says it has significantly improved Polybed PSA systems by incorporating several generations of technological advancements. New generations of adsorbents, enhanced cycle configurations, modified process and equipment designs, and more reliable control systems and equipment – combined with decades of operational expertise — have resulted in higher performance and reliability, and improved operability at a lower cost. 

 

Earlier this year, UOP announced it supplied 1,000th PSA unit. The Polybed PSA system is a skid-mounted, modular unit that comes complete with hardware, adsorbents, control systems and embedded process technology. The process uses proprietary UOP adsorbents to adsorb impurities at high pressure from hydrogen-containing waste streams and subsequently reject them at low pressure. 

 

The UOP system provides 99.95% on-stream reliability in supply of 99.9% purity hydrogen, according to company officials. In addition to recovering and purifying hydrogen from steam reformers and refinery off-gases, Polybed PSA systems can be used to produce hydrogen from other sources, including ethylene off-gas, methanol off-gas and partial oxidation/syngas.

 

As MRC wrote before, PetroChina planned to spend more than 10 billion yuan (USD1.6 billion) on shale gas this year. PetroChina's decision to triple its shale gas spending from expenditures on the unconventional fuel over the past few years comes just months after Sinopec lifted hopes that China is near a breakthrough by announcing a commercial find. PetroChina has also lifted its 2015 shale gas output target to 2.6 billion cubic metres, up from the previous 1.5 Bcm, according to a company official and a government source cited by the news wire. That would represent only about 2.3% of China's total natural gas output of around 113 Bcm last year.