Honeywell To Modernize Refinery For Azerbaijan State Oil Company

---

The State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR) is modernizing one of its oil refineries, and it’s enlisting Honeywell’s help to do it. Honeywell UOP (Universal Oil Products) will supply equipment to the Heydar Aliyev Oil Refinery in Baku to purify the hydrogen used and produced during the refining process. Specifically, UOP is providing SOCAR with a pair of PSA (Pressure Swing Adsorption) units to be controlled by Honeywell Process Solutions C300 distributed control systems.

Hydrogen is crucial to the refinery’s work because it helps to remove contaminants from the oil. It also makes the refined fuel burn more cleanly by supporting catalytic processes during the refining stage. By using Honeywell’s PSA technology, the updated refinery will be able to produce fuels that meet Euro V standards for vehicle emissions.

Purification Process

Pressure Swing Adsorption purifies the hydrogen by exposing it to a bed of adsorbent material such as porous, activated carbon. At certain pressures and temperatures, contaminants will stick to (be adsorbed by) the exposed surfaces of the material, leaving the hydrogen gas cleaner. Later, a change in temperature and pressure (a pressure swing) decontaminates the adsorbent material, and the process is repeated until the hydrogen is pure enough.

UOP reports that it has sold more than 1,000 of its Polybed PSA Systems to customers located in more than 70 countries.

Future Production

When the new PSA equipment is operational, Honeywell says, the refinery expects to be able to produce cleaner-burning fuels and products such as asphalt from 8.3 million tons (7.5 million metric tons) of crude oil each year.

Source: Honeywell