Black & Veatch Meets Client’s Financial and Environmental Objectives

Reliance Petroleum’s Jamnagar Refinery is one of the world’s largest greenfield oil refining complexes. It has capacity to treat more than one million barrels of oil per day.

As part of this operation, the Jamnagar Sulfur Complex converts hydrogen sulfide, which has to be extracted during the refining of crude oil to meet fuel quality standards, producing a marketable form of sulfur. To meet growing demand, Reliance needed to expand the complex.

Black & Veatch did more than just help Reliance meet its goals in that area. The company worked round the clock to cut project completion time by as much as 20 percent.

Reliance and Black & Veatch had successfully teamed up to install the three original sulfur processing units. The scope of the expansion work included a new 3 x 675 metric tons per day (Mt/d) cold bed absorption (CBA) sulfur recovery unit (SRU) and new common 2,025 Mt/d tail gas treating unit (TGTU). The expanded complex has a total sulfur processing nominal capacity of 6 x 675 tons per day.

6 Months Ahead

This type of project commonly takes 30 months to complete, but Black & Veatch met a 24-month schedule. Black & Veatch provided maximum replication of the existing design to provide operational consistency. It also reduced the operations learning curve for refinery personnel with respect to commissioning, start up and operation.

Environmental restrictions presented another key challenge. India had increased its recovery efficiency requirement for new units to 99.9 percent. Black & Veatch combined the benefits of the previously installed CBA technology with the latest tail gas treating technology to meet the requirement. The project was the first to use this approach in a complex of this size.

The combined technology approach also reduced Reliance’s capital cost by not having to utilize a spare TGTU.