Energy & Refining

Power generation is the process of converting / transforming primary energy sources (e.g. oil, natural gas, and hydro) into easy-to-use and easy-to-transport energy (secondary energy), e.g. electricity. For that purpose, there are several methods of generating electricity available such as power plants. The processing and refinement of primary energy sources relies on refineries.

Solutions for Refineries

LAR’s Solutions and Beneftis

Online Process Analyzers:

Application-specific water quality analyzers as turnkey solutions for your analytical measuring requirements.
Worldwide Support:

Our Customer Success Team supports you from the first contact to realization and commissioning to after sales services. We care for you!
Effective Water Management:

Using the proper online process instrumentation helps to avoid high costs, e.g. by preventing product losses or losses of heating energy.

Electricity generators are driven by thermal energy sources geothermal energy, nuclear power, chemical energy or mechanical energy of turbines (kinetic energy) from wind power and hydro power.

In petroleum refining, vapors are reduced to liquids in condensers and coolers are used to lower temperature of liquid porducts to permit safe handling. Principal processes are distillation, cracking, polymerization, alkylation as well as treating and finishing products. The quantity and quality of water required by the entire refinery and in individual operations are affected by the type of refinery process.

Major use of water in power generation and petroleum refinery is for

cooling (once-through or circulating water systems)
boiler feed for water-steam cycles
processing

Sources of water

surface water (rivers, lakes, ground water)
reused water (cooling cycles, condensate return, make-up water)

Large amounts of high-quality water are used by power plants and petroleum refineries to produce low- and high-pressure steam. Careful condiseration must be given to the selection and treatment of feed water to prevent plant failures and maintain high operational safety.

International and national authorities have defined guidelines with recommendations for a variety of quality parameters to maintain continuous monitoring of the water-cycles. For a safe plant operation the fast and reliable detection of contamination of water-cycles is crucial.

Organic contamination may lead to equipment and/or plant failures caused by

Corrosion
Sedimentation
Scale formation
Biological growth

Main source of organics (TOC) in water-cycles is make-up water. The less make-up water is used the lower the risk of contamination of cycle and the higher the benefit from re-use of contendate return and boiler feed water.

Organic compounds most relevant when using surface water for steam generation are

High molecular weight Neutrals (Polysaccharides)
Low molecular weight Neutrals (Alcohols, Aldehydes, Ketones)
Compounds containing heteroatoms or contain halogens, like chlorine

Polysaccharides are decomposed to low molecular weight neutrals (Glucose and others) and organic acids. Acid conductivity will be raised. Additionally, polysacharides promote biological growth functioning as nutrients.

Monitoring of TOC in make-up water is essential.