Iraqi refinery adds units to produce cleaner fuels

Lanaz Co. has let a contract to Honeywell UOP LLC to deliver technology licensing and equipment for a project to increase production of cleaner-burning transportation fuels at the operator’s 100,000-b/d refinery at Erbil in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.

As part of the contract, Honeywell UOP supplied basic engineering design, licensing, and full-modular units equipped with its proprietary naphtha hydrotreating and fixed-bed platforming process technology for the Lanaz clean-fuels upgrading project, the service provider said in a Jan. 10 release.

Honeywell UOP disclosed no further details regarding its scope of work under the contract, but Ilsung Hisco Ltd. of South Korea, which acted as UOP Honeywell’s equipment fabricator, said in an early January 2020 presentation that—in addition to a series of storage vessels, drums, tanks, and related components—it manufactured the following major units for the Lanaz project:

• One naphtha hydrotreating reactor.
• Three fluidized bed process reactors.
• One naphtha splitter.
• One natural gas chloride treater.
• One debutanizer.
• One LPG chloride treater.

Lanaz has yet to officially confirm either additional details or a status of the upgrading project, but the refinery was scheduled to commission a new high-octane plant at the site by yearend 2021, according to the latest information available on the operator’s website.

Consisting of eight production units and also equipped to produce 3,600 tonnes/day of bitumen, the Lanaz refinery was commissioned in 2008.