Safety-Considered Proactive Flare Minimization Strategy under Ethylene Plant Upsets

摘要

Ethylene plant upsets usually lead to flaring of off-spec products, resulting in significant losses of raw material and energy as well as to air emission problems. Under the premise of plant safe operation, establishing process recycles connecting off-spec streams to their upper-stream process can help to reduce flaring during plant upsets. Operational strategies for recycling the potential flaring sources, i.e., effluents from the acetylene reactor and ethylene tower overhead, under various process upsets are developed and analyzed based on rigorous plant-wide dynamic simulations. Safety considerations on the compressor system performance have been addressed by quantitative comparison of the effectiveness of various recycling strategies. Case studies demonstrate that the safety-considered flare minimization strategies can proactively reduce the flaring emission amount and upset time and thus have great potentials of economical and environmental benefits to ethylene plants.