Honeywell's UOP To Supply Its 1,000th Hydrogen Purification System

UOP LLC, a Honeywell company, recently announced the award of its 1,000th system for purifying hydrogen, which is being installed at Ruwais Refinery, United Arab Emirates, and operated by the Abu Dhabi Oil Refining Company (TAKREER).

The UOP Polybed PSA system will recover and purify hydrogen for TAKREER’s Carbon Black and Delayed Coker Project to meet the increasing need for clean transportation fuels. UOP first invented the Polybed PSA technology in 1966 and has supplied improved versions of the technology to meet the growing global demand for hydrogen. Hydrogen is essential in today’s refining industry for upgrading heavy crude oils into refined fuels, in addition to helping meet increasingly tight transportation fuel specifications.

“The selection of our 1,000th PSA unit is a great milestone for UOP that demonstrates the value we have brought to high-purity hydrogen technology over the last half century,” said Rebecca Liebert, senior vice president and general manager of Honeywell’s UOP Gas Processing and Hydrogen business unit. “It also shows that UOP remains at the cutting edge of innovation while offering the most compelling economic solutions for our customers.”

Polybed PSA Systems are skid-mounted, modular units complete with hardware, adsorbents, control systems and embedded process technology, enabling quick and efficient installation to reduce cost and downtime.

The process uses proprietary UOP adsorbents to remove impurities at high pressure from hydrogen-containing process streams, allowing hydrogen to be recovered and upgraded to more than 99.9-percent purity to meet refining needs. In addition to recovering and purifying hydrogen from steam reformers and refinery off-gases, Polybed PSA Systems can be used to produce hydrogen from other sources such as ethylene off-gas, methanol off-gas and partial oxidation/synthesis gas.

Since the first small, four-bed hydrogen PSA system was commercialized in 1966, UOP has significantly improved the Polybed PSA systems by incorporating several generations of technological advancements. New generations of adsorbents, enhanced cycle configurations, modified process and equipment designs and more reliable control systems and equipment combined with decades of operational expertise — have resulted in higher performance and reliability and improved operability at a lower cost.

Honeywell’s UOP Gas Processing and Hydrogen business offers technology, equipment and materials to treat and process natural gas, as well as to purify hydrogen used in refineries. Its gas technologies extract contaminants such as water, mercury, sulfur and carbon dioxide from raw natural gas. UOP also offers technologies to recover natural gas liquids (NGLs). UOP gas processing solutions are offered as efficient pre-engineered equipment packages or licensed technology. The business has supplied technology to more than 3,600 individual process units for gas processing in a broad range of applications through the world.