Refineries: Application Focus

Sour Water Stripping (SWS) Ensure your sour water stripping reliably
supports your unit production quotas and
Process Description your water quality requirements.
Sour water stripping is used to remove ammonia (NH 3 )
and hydrogen sulfide (H 2 S) from sour water streams
coming from many unit operations to condition it for
discharge or reuse within the refinery. In a complex refinery,
most of the sour water comes from distillation, fluid
catalytic cracking, catalytic reforming, coker and acid gas
removal units, with many other operations contributing to
the balance. The different streams are collected in a surge
tank for centralized processing via a heat exchanger and
a single stripper column, or two in series. A combination
of pH control and heat, from direct injection steam or
reboiler drives off the ammonia and hydrogen sulfide. The
presence of solids and hydrocarbons (‘oils’) are major
contaminants that cause heat exchanger, stripper column, condition resulting in environmental risk and/or the need to
and reboiler fouling. The impact is loss of SWS capacity reduce refinery capacity.
that may bottleneck refinery production rates, drive the
need for unscheduled SWS shutdowns and cleanouts Refinery Needs
leading to additional production losses, high maintenance
• Achieve refinery unit production quotas via reliable
costs and increased worker safety issues from exposure
treatment of the sour water in the SWS
to the highly volatile H2 S in the sour water system. Oil
contamination of the stripper also leads to a range of • Meet water quality specifications for discharge, further
problems downstream. One is oil carryover in the acid gas treatment or re-use in the refinery
stream heading to the sulfur plant, leading to sulfur plant • Minimize maintenance costs and worker exposure
reliability issues and increased risk of fires from oil coking issues due to SWS fouling
of the reactor beds. Another is excess oil in the stripped • Ensure sulfur plant reliability by minimizing oil carryover
water to the water treatment plant creating an overload in the SWS acid gas stream

Production Challenge / Pall Solution

Challenge Solution
Meet daily refinery unit Improve refinery productivity targets and sulfur plant reliability and SWS cost control
production targets by meeting by effective removal of particulate and oil contaminants that are fouling the SWS reboiler and
SWS H2S, NH3 and capacity column trays and the acid gas stream affecting SWS and sulfur plant capacity and reliability that
treatment targets back up refinery unit operations.
Cyclonic separators will not effectively remove the oils:
Ensure sulfur plant and water • especially on stable emulsions, due to the fine oil droplet size resisting separation.
treatment plant reliability • under varying sour water flow conditions that cause loss of inertial separation efficiency. Use
through reliable removal of oils of recycle loops to main inertial efficiency greatly increase initial capex and system complexity,
from the acid gas and stripped leading to high maintenance and poor reliability of oil removal.
sour water streams High efficiency prefilters and AquaSep® EL liquid/liquid coalescers reliably remove
particulate and oils from stable sour water emulsions, with 0% to 100% turndown,
Reduce SWS labor and
ensuring maintained SWS capacity and reliability.
maintenance costs from
particulate and oil fouling
Process Flow Diagram
Stripped water
Acid gas

1 2

Stripper column
Heat
Sour exchanger
water
feeds
Liquid /liquid
Liquid particle coalescer 1
Sour water filter(s)1
storage tank

1 Consider placement of the particle filter and coalescer upstream of the storage tank if oil fouling of the tank
is a labor and maintenance issue, or if one incoming stream is identified as problematic.

Key Applications / Filter Recommendations

Application Pall Product Advantages Customer Benefits
1 Prefiltration prior Vector™ High Flow filters, Efficient removal of solids Improves the efficiency and life of the
to liquid/liquid Ultipleat® High Flow filters, from the coalescer and SWS liquid/liquid coalescer
coalescer coreless filters, and/or a Improves SWS production, reliability, safety
range of FSI™ filter bags and opex by controlling particulate fouling
of the heat exchanger and stripper reboiler
and trays

2 Hydrocarbon AquaSep® EL2 liquid/liquid Removes hydrocarbon Improves SWS reliability, safety and opex
removal coalescer in horizontal carryover into the heat challenges by controlling oil fouling of the
configuration exchanger and stripper heat exchanger and stripper reboiler and
column trays
Improves sulfur plant reliability and safety
by removing oil carryover into the reactor
beds
Freedom from oil overload to the water
treatment plant that can create an
environmental hazard and/or a refinery
capacity limitation.
2 Based on sour water pH between 4 and 8.5 at point of filtration. Consult Pall for pH outside of this range.

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Because of technological developments related to the products, systems, and/or
+1 888 873 7255 toll free US services described herein, the data and procedures are subject to change without
notice. Please consult your Pall representative or visit www.pall.com to verify that
this information remains valid. Products in this document may be covered by one or
more patent numbers. For a complete list of Pall’s patents please visit
http://www.pall.com/main/about-pall/patents.page

© Copyright 2017 Pall Corporation. Pall, , AquaSep, FSI, Ultipleat, and Vector are trademarks
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FCREFSWSENb Produced in the USA September 2017