Honeywell UOP (Des Plaines, Ill.) announced today that Hengli Petrochemical Co. Ltd. successfully started up seven UOP Polybed pressure swing adsorption (PSA) units supplying high-purity hydrogen at its complex in Dalian, Liaoning, China.
UOP’s modular PSA Units (Source: Honeywell UOP)
As a fully integrated site, the complex produces gasoline and diesel, along with plastics and other chemicals. Hengli will use the PSA units in downstream hydrotreating to create feedstock for petrochemical products, producing approximately 1.4 million Nm3/h (normal cubic meters per hour) of hydrogen.
“Hydrogen purification is essential to produce clean fuels, remove contaminants and improve the quality of fuels and petrochemicals,” said Bryan Glover, vice president and general manager, of the UOP Process Technologies business. “Customers such as Hengli are choosing UOP PSA technology because of its record of producing a reliable and efficient source of high-purity hydrogen to improve the efficiency of their operations.
Polybed PSA systems are skid-mounted, modular units with hardware, adsorbents, control systems and embedded process technology. Modular delivery can reduce the installation time by up to 30%, versus conventional “stick-built” construction.
The PSA process uses proprietary UOP adsorbents to remove impurities at high pressure from hydrogen-containing process streams, allowing hydrogen to be recovered and upgraded to more than 99.9% purity to meet refining needs. In addition to 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 gas.
Hengli Petrochemical, established in 1994, is one of the largest refining and petrochemical companies in China. In 2017, Hengli selected Callidus advanced flares and low-nitrogen oxides (NOx) burner technology for its refinery and petrochemicals complex.