When a vessel in the phenosolvan unit began leaking in Dec. 2007, it meant the Great Plains Synfuels Plant had to be shut down for five and a half weeks. During that time, two cracks were found and repaired.
Now, work is progressing on a project to prevent another unscheduled plant outage from happening again. A second phenosolvan unit is being constructed at the Synfuels Plant, which will be connected to the first unit.
Mike Lewis, Dakota Gasification Company
“This was one of the few remaining open areas of the plant, and it’s close to the existing unit. So, it was kind of an obvious choice,” Mike Lewis, mechanical and civil engineering supervisor at Dakota Gas, said.
This unit is being built to work just like the first phenosolvan unit. It’ll extract phenol from the gas liquor stream. Gas liquor is primarily a water stream that comes from the gasifiers.
Phenosolvan vessel lifted, ready to be set on its foundation at Great Plains Synfuels Plant.
Lewis said each unit will continuously run at 50 percent capacity. That allows the existing equipment to operate closer to original design flow rates, and it ensures reliability for both units. “If equipment sits for too long not being used, you might find that you have problems starting it up when you need it,” Lewis said. “So it’s better just to keep it going at a lower rate and then shut one down when you need to work on it.” Outages will be scheduled for each unit on a regular basis; when one unit is down, the other will run at full capacity.
The project is slated to be mechanically complete near the end of October.
Watch the video in the Dakota Gas gallery here: Second phenosolvan unit built at Synfuels Plant
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