Fired Heaters in the Process Industries

Optimizing Operations and Minimizing Emissions

The process industries, which include chemicals, metals and mining, oil and gas, petrochemicals, pulp and paper, and refining, are very energy-intensive. In these industries, fired heaters are the largest energy consumers and represent a tremendous opportunity for energy savings. Often referred to as a boiler or furnace, a fired heater is a heat exchanger that transfers heat from fuel combustion to process f luids that flow through tubular coils within an insulated enclosure. In refineries, the most energy intensive fired heaters are thermal cracking furnaces, alkylation furnaces, catalytic reformer units, catalytic hydrocracking heaters, and steam methane reformers.

Fired heaters have potential for improvement in many areas such as safety, energy efficiency, asset performance, asset lifespan, and emissions reductions.

Particularly during startup and shutdown, a fired heater presents a major safety risk. Poor controls or lack of accurate monitoring of live conditions such as excess fuel levels within the fired heater could result in an explosion.

Erring on the side of safety, operators often attempt to minimize that risk by using excess air in the combustion process. However, this decreases fuel efficiency and leads to higher CO2 and NOx emissions.

Less than optimal controls could also result in failures in the process equipment and reduced asset lifespans.

By deploying contemporary measurement and control technologies in conjunction with updated operation and maintenance procedures, fired heater users can realize significant improvements in energy efficiency, safety, asset performance and asset lifespan.

New developments in process instrumentation and analytical technologies have proven to enhance optimization of industrial fired heaters resulting in:

• Increased energy efficiency
• Protection of equipment and component investments
• Reduction of unscheduled production downtime
• Reduction in operation and maintenance costs (OPEX)
• Reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
• Improvement in production quality and management of quantity
• Production effectiveness and repeatability
• Safety improvement
• Asset performance management improvement