Refineries

Process heaters consume the majority of a refinery’s fuel, making fired heater performance the single largest lever on energy efficiency and operating cost. CPE provides engineering across every configuration found in refinery service - vertical cylindrical, horizontal tube box, helical coil, direct-fired reboilers, and multi-service heaters with multiple coils in a common radiant section. Our scope includes heater performance assessment and diagnosis (tube skin temperature surveys, draft profiles, flue gas analysis, heat balance calculations), burner evaluation and specification (low-NOx technologies, BMS design per NFPA 86 and API 556, multi-fuel and dual-fuel systems), and tube remaining life assessment per API 530 including creep life, oxidation rates, and heater re-rating.

CPE also addresses the specialty heater services that define refinery thermal operations. Delayed coker charge heaters - heating heavy vacuum residuum to 900-950°F at high velocity to prevent premature tube coking - require simultaneous consideration of heat transfer, process chemistry, and mechanical design. Catalytic reformer interheaters operate in a high-temperature, hydrogen-rich environment where hydrogen attack and embrittlement drive materials evaluation per API 941. CPE brings the process-specific knowledge that these services demand.

Claus process SRUs are fired equipment installations with specific combustion, metallurgical, and emissions requirements. CPE provides reaction furnace burner design and optimization (air/acid gas ratio control, flame stability with variable H₂S concentration, contaminant management), refractory specification for 1800-2500°F service, waste heat boiler engineering addressing tube sheet corrosion and ammonium salt fouling, catalytic converter reheater systems, and tail gas incinerator design. As refineries shift to heavier and higher-sulfur crude slates, SRU capacity frequently becomes a refinery-wide bottleneck - CPE evaluates limitations across the unit and designs modifications to increase throughput.

Refinery emissions control spans combustion sources, process sources, and fugitive sources. CPE’s scope focuses on the equipment-specific engineering that determines compliance: low-NOx burners, SCR and SNCR on heaters and boilers (addressing catalyst poisoning from sulfur compounds), FCCU wet gas scrubbers, ESPs, and third-stage separator cyclones for particulate, CO boiler engineering for partial-burn FCCU regenerators, and SRU optimization and tail gas treating to reduce SO₂ at the source. CPE designs systems that comply with the overlapping Refinery MACT I and II, Petroleum Refinery NSPS Subparts J and Ja, and applicable boiler MACT and NSPS standards.

CPE executes refinery work under API 530, 556, 560, 579-1/ASME FFS-1, and 941, ASME Sections I, II, IV, and VIII, ASME B31.3, NFPA 85/86, ISA 84/IEC 61511, NACE MR0103/ISO 17945, EPA Refinery NSPS Subparts J and Ja, Refinery MACT I and II (Subparts CC and UUU), Boiler MACT (Subpart DDDDD), and state air quality and Title V programs.