Insight through innovation

The Asian petrochemical market is on the brink of a significant expansion. The growth of sectors such as construction, automotive, packaging, and textiles in the region is expected to boost the demand for petrochemical products. Countries such as China, India, Malaysia, and Indonesia are investing heavily in infrastructure, technology, and manufacturing. The International Energy Agency (IEA) says the speed and scale of the expansion of China’s petrochemical sector dwarfs any historical precedent. It says that in the five years prior to 2024, China was estimated to have added as much production capacity for ethylene and propylene as existed in Europe, Japan, and Korea combined.¹

The investment in facilities such as Malaysia’s RAPID complex – capable of processing up to 300 000 bpd of crude and 3 million tpy of petrochemical products – illustrates the current scale of confidence in Asia’s petrochemical sector. Elsewhere in the region, South Korea’s Lotte Group plans to build a large scale petrochemical complex in Indonesia, driven by a surging demand for packaging and consumer products.²

For refinery owners and operators, the Asian petrochemical market offers significant opportunities. However, meeting such an anticipated expansion in demand also presents challenges.

Maximising throughput, maintaining operational efficiency, and minimising unplanned shutdowns in complex facilities will be critical to answering growing order requirements and ensuring increased profitability. Improving process control will be essential to deal with fluctuating feedstock quality and changing process conditions. Meeting sustainability targets, such as reducing energy consumption, emissions, and chemical usage will also be critical as regional and global environmental regulations become tighter.

To address these challenges, petrochemical asset managers and operators are increasingly turning to nucleonic instrumentation technologies to gain enhanced process insights, optimisation, and reliability. Advances in nucleonic instrumentation, supported by improved data acquisition, are enabling greater visibility. Traditionally, the deployment of nucleonic instruments has been limited to the most challenging measurement applications. However, advances in hardware and software have accelerated their use in several duties across processing units, in particular, duties involving dynamic changes in process conditions. Robust nucleonic instrumentation systems can be designed to suit most measurement applications.

Nucleonic instrumentation: a clearer view of process optimisation

Nucleonic instrumentation is a transformative technology for petrochemical operations, delivering real-time, non-intrusive measurements for fluid separation, level detection, and density monitoring. These tools can provide operators with the clarity, accuracy, precision, and reliability needed to overcome the most challenging measurement applications.

By deploying low-energy gamma radiation, nucleonic instrumentation can provide continuous and accurate insights into the state of process fluids and interfaces inside the vessel without requiring direct contact with the process medium. This can make nucleonic instrumentation highly suitable for retrofit applications and ideal for environments experiencing extreme pressures, temperatures, and fouling often found in petrochemical facilities.

A range of nucleonic instrumentation is available for the process industry, including products for level, density, and interface measurement. This instrumentation enables operators to accurately monitor process conditions, allowing for real-time control and operational improvements in petrochemical facilities.

The Tracerco Profiler^TM is a high-resolution technology-based instrument that characterises and controls real-time process conditions to provide a true profile of the fluid process. More than 750 instruments are currently deployed around the world for separation, measurement, and control of fluids in upstream and downstream assets such as FPSOs, oil and tar sands, refinery crude distillation units (CDUs), and other applications, including subsea separation and compression systems.

The company’s nucleonic instrumentation provides continuous clarity of the process conditions inside a vessel and accurate control to support reduced foaming and emulsions. The instruments can be deployed in almost any separation application where accurate control and monitoring of process phases is required for high resolution of density, bulk level, or settling solids processes. By accurately identifying hydrocarbon, water, gas, and solid phases, operators can optimise separation processes, reduce chemical usage, and improve product yield.

Tracerco^TM Level+ Measurement Instrumentation is designed for liquid level, interface, and solids monitoring in upstream and downstream process vessels. It is suitable for bulk-level measurement in challenging oil, chemical, and petrochemical industry applications, including those with the potential for solids deposition and temperature and pressure extremes. This instrument is particularly effective in applications involving solid build-up, such as polymer reactors and distillation towers. By distinguishing between actual fluid levels and deposits on vessel walls, it can eliminate false level readings and prevent operational inefficiencies. False level readings occur due to deposition or additional density materials in the process, affecting signal attenuation on the detector. The instrument overcomes this challenge due to its segmented level approach, which enables multiple measurement points across an equivalent range, when compared to traditional scintillator technology instruments using a single point of measurement.

Tracerco^TM Density Measurement Instrumentation provides non-contact density measurements with no moving parts. Designed for extreme operating conditions, it offers precise and reliable data. Its ability to operate externally makes it suitable for retrofitting to older petrochemical assets such as distillation columns, stripper columns, reactors, units in purified terephthalic acid (PTA), purified isophthalic acid (PIA), and propane dehydrogenation (PDH) plants, where vessel modifications can be costly or impractical. With extended capabilities of up to 45 m, it provides flexibility for large scale operational measurement ranges.

References

1. HEALEY, C., ‘China’s petrochemical surge is driving global oil demand growth,’ International Energy Agency, (19 December 2023) https://www.iea.org/commentaries/china-s-petrochemical-surge-is-driving-global-oil-demand-growth
2. ‘S. Korea Lotte Chemical to build $3.9 bln petchem project in Indonesia’, Reuters, (7 January, 2022) https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/skoreas-lotte-chemical-form-petchem-project-indonesia-worth-39-bln-2022-01-07/

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