It’s a FCCU, What Could Go Wrong? (and what could go right?)

Conference:

Plenty of things can go wrong in the FCCU. Metals contamination, regenerator heat balance, pressure balance is off, corrosion, leaks, loss of feed or refinery utilities, and valves that won’t seal are some of the many issues we experience in the CatCracker. Experience is the best teacher, so what have we learned? What can you share?

During this discussion, refiners and suppliers share best practices, lessons learned and other stories of working in the FCCU so that we can all benefit as a CatCracking community. Maybe you have had a similar experience and solved it or kept it from happening with a different fix. Maybe what you share or what you hear will prevent a future issue.

Why not share a good experience, too? What did you do right? It’s OK to feel good about making a correct choice, or being proactive or preventing an upset. Whether it was simple or complex, we’d like to hear about it.

The discussion could evolve into “routine” duties that operators perform on a selected schedule. These duties that are performed could include alarm, valve operation, safety system, & critical instrumentation checks. Have any refiners experienced a unit shutdown or incident while performing these supposedly routine checks? All of these routine checks generally (or should) have written procedures that should be reviewed periodically. In fact, all procedures should be reviewed periodically or when something has changed that affects the current procedure. The procedure that is being used for the routine duty should also reference procedures to follow if an emergency arises during the check out / test.