Scale-up challenges in synthesis gas production

Publisher Summary It has for a long time been realized among plant owners and investors that large petrochemical complexes have far better economics than small complexes. Therefore, to harvest the benefit of this economics of scale effect, the current trend is to design and build still larger plants, such as, for instance, very large GTL facilities comprising multiple lines each with a high single-line capacity or huge methanol and ammonia plants. To exploit the full potential of these plants, all individual pieces of process equipment must function as expected. The malfunction or an unexpected breakdown of one single piece of equipment may significantly hamper the plant economics; thus, it is of utmost importance that the scaling-up issues are addressed properly each time a critical piece of equipment is designed to exceed the capacity of previous industrial references. This chapter discusses the issues and challenges relevant to scale-up plants for the conversion of natural gas to a synthesis gas production for Fischer–Tropsch-based GTL, methanol, and ammonia. A single line of a typical synthesis gas production for the above products comprises a number of desulfurization vessels, the reformer section, and the process gas waste heat cooling section. In some cases, an additional process gas heated reformer may be included as well.