(13d) Naphtha Contamination and Furnace Coil Plugging

In the 4th quarter 2001, BASF and Total started up one of the world's largest naphtha based olefins facilities in Pt. Arthur, TX. After the unit start up, the furnaces were plagued with coil plugs. In a 3 year period from 2002 to 2005, we had over 90 plugged coils. It caused an excessive amount of downtime, maintenance and coil cost, and lost production revenue. The plant was originally constructed as a furnace limited plant. We discovered that our naphtha feedstock was contaminated and this was the most likely cause of the plugging.

This presentation will discuss the problem and how we solved it. It will give an overview of the naphtha feed system and furnaces, explain the contamination and lab results, provide possible sources of the contamination, present the coil plugging history and production losses, explain possible fouling mechanisms, efforts taken to mitigate the fouling, and the improvements made to furnace reliability. It will also discuss challenges that we still face and have to solve in the future.