Honeywell (HON) UOP announced that Zhejiang Petrochemical Co. Ltd. (ZPC) will use four of its Polybed™ pressure swing adsorption (PSA) units to supply high-purity hydrogen for its new integrated refining and petrochemical complex in Zhoushan, Zhejiang Province. The complex will use Honeywell Experion™ distributed control systems from Honeywell Process Solutions, and the PSA units will be controlled by Honeywell C300 controllers integrated with the Experion system.
Zhejiang Petrochemical earlier awarded petrochemical process technology licensing, engineering design and catalysts to Honeywell UOP. When completed, the new plant will be the largest crude-to-chemicals complex in China and one of the largest in the world, manufacturing petrochemicals to make plastic resins, films and fibers, as well as fuels.
“Our customers in China are selecting UOP’s PSA technology as an extremely competitive and reliable source of high purity hydrogen,” said John Gugel, vice president and general manager, Gas Processing and Hydrogen at Honeywell UOP. “This is critical because hydrogen is essential to the operation of any refinery or petrochemical plant, and the quality of that hydrogen helps determine the efficiency of the entire complex.”
Polybed PSA systems are skid-mounted, modular units complete with hardware, adsorbents, control systems and embedded process technology, enabling quick and efficient installation to reduce cost and downtime.
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-percent 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.
Since the first small, four-bed hydrogen PSA system was commercialized in 1966, Honeywell UOP has significantly improved Polybed PSA systems by incorporating new generations of adsorbents, enhanced cycle configurations, modified process and equipment designs and more reliable control systems and equipment. Today, Honeywell UOP has installed 1,067 Polybed PSA units in more than 70 countries.
Honeywell UOP’s Gas Processing and Hydrogen business offers technology, equipment and materials to treat and process natural gas, as well as to purify hydrogen used in refineries. Its gas technologies extract water, mercury, sulfur, carbon dioxide and other contaminants from raw natural gas, and recover valuable natural gas liquids (NGLs). These solutions are offered as efficient pre-engineered equipment packages or licensed technology.
