Plant Engineer

I had been asked late in the afternoon to travel to a plant that was shut down due to liquid off specification. The next morning they were supposed to start up, they had 4 hours to get on specification. I had never heard of the plant before. I was given P&IDs and a map to the plant. I set off that evening without knowing the owner or anything about the plant.

That evening in the motel I started to review the P&IDs. They were an issue well before issued for construction. And yet this plant was in operation and had been for years. A HAZOP must have been done on faith.

I walked into the control room that was gripped with a sense of crisis. The plant engineer introduced himself but said he was busy with their consultants. A local firm that took care of plant modifications, mainly from the construction side. I listened to them for a while, and realized they were upset that there was water in the Flare Knock-Out. They were trying to figure out how water could have been in the Flare Knock-Out. I told them where it came from, they could not believe it but when they looked they saw I was right. The regeneration gas scrubber dumped water into the flare knock-out. Like most plants. I was not smart or prescient, I had just seen a lot of plants. They immediately went into design modification. How could they keep water out of the flare knock out so that in the future they could dump NGL into the drum without freezing up. I tried to tell them that the plant had been operating for years without a problem. If they didn't drain NGL into the flare drum they would make more money and not have a problem.

I told them of alternatives, if you insist on draining your product to the the drain, drain water off as low as you can, add methanol, and then drain your profit off. This was not acceptable, they needed a separate drain system for water. They added that for $1 million dollar plus. In the future when an engineer decides to throw away their product, it won't freeze up.

That sounds like if you invest $1 million+ now, you can protect your self from engineers like that.