Turkish Petroleum Refineries Corp. (Tupras) has let a contract to Honeywell UOP LLC, a subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for a new hydrocracking unit designed to boost diesel production at its 11 million-tonne/year Izmit refinery in Turkey’s northwestern province of Kocaeli.
As part of the contract, Honeywell UOP has provided the refinery technology licensing and equipment for its proprietary Unicracking enhanced two-stage processing unit, which produces 75,000 b/sd of middle-distillate products, including Jet A-1 aviation and Euro 5-quality diesel fuels, the service provider said.
Already installed and in operation, the Unicracking unit is integrated with the Izmit refinery’s Honeywell UOP-licensed coker naphtha and distillate Unionfining units in a system that uses a common fractionation section and collectively processes feedstocks of straight-run diesel, coker gas oil, and vacuum gas oils.
Alongside increasing diesel production at the site by up to 7% to help Tupras meet rising domestic demand for transportation fuel, the new unit also will contribute to reductions in the refinery’s consumption of energy and hydrogen, according to Honeywell UOP.
Neither a value of the contract nor startup date of unit was disclosed.
Turkish upgrades
This latest addition at the Izmit refinery follows a host of modernization and upgrading projects Tupras has undertaken in recent years to improve operations at its Turkish refining operations, which at Izmit included the $2.7 billion residuum upgrading project (RUP) (OGJ Online, Sept. 30, 2014).
Completed in May 2015, RUP included installation of the following major units (OGJ Online, Apr. 19, 2016):
• A 7,500-cu m/d (cmd) (47,000-b/d) vacuum distillation unit.
• An 8,200-cmd (52,000-b/d) delayed coker.
• An 8,000-cmd (50,000-b/d) hydrocracker.
• A 1,200-cmd (7,500-b/d) naphtha hydrogenation unit.
• A 4,000-cmd (25,000-b/d) diesel desulfurization unit.
• A 160,000-normal cu m/hr hydrogen unit.
• A 440-tonne/day (3,200-b/d) sulfur unit.
• A 120.36-Mw integrated cogeneration power plant.
• A 26,400-cmd (166,000-b/d) amine regeneration unit.
Upgrading work remains ongoing at two of Tupras’ other Turkish refineries, including the 11 million-tpy Aliaga refinery at Izmir and the 1.1 million-tpy refinery at Batman (OGJ Online, Nov. 10, 2014).
Contact Robert Brelsford at [email protected].
