MEI Maverick Engineering, a wholly owned subsidiary of Triple 5 Worldwide, provides a complete spectrum of engineering, procurement, and construction services for the refining industry. We provide cost-effective, safe project delivery solutions for your refinery project. Our experience and capabilities covers a wide range of refinery processes and related ancillary facilities, including clean fuels production (low sulfur gasoline and diesel). Our experience in grassroots (greenfield), revamp (brownfield), expansion, and turnaround projects covers your entire refining project needs.
Previous pages have dealt with the major refinery processes, but we have not covered all by no means.
Isomerization units normally process either butane or a mix of pentane and hexane. It is a process that converts normal butane, normal pentane, and normal hexane into their isoparaffins which have a much higher octane number. Isomerization of normal butane to isobutane provides additional feedstocks for alkylation units, and the conversion of normal pentanes and hexanes into isopentane and isohexane can enhance the gasoline blending process in a refinery.
In the refining and petrochemical industries, the term BTX refers to a aromatic hydrocarbon mixture of benzene, toluene, and the three xylene isomers. If ethylbenzene is included in the mixture, it is referred to as BTEX.
Although BTX can be made by several processes, the predominant means of production is based on the recovery of aromatics from the catalytic reforming of naphtha. Another process to produce BTX is the steam cracking of hydrocarbons which usually produces a cracked naphtha often referred to as pyrolysis gasoline, or pygas.
BTX aromatics can be removed from catalytic reformate or from pygas by several methods, most of which involve a solvent either for liquid-liquid extraction or extractive distillation. Typical solvents include:
- sulfolane
- furfural
- tetraethylene glycol
- dimethylsulfoxide
- N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone