This article was included in one of Hydrocarbon Processing’s three daily show newspapers at the NPRA Q&A and Technology Forum in San Antonio, Texas.


An increased focus on proper hydrogen management could lead to significantly higher profits at many global refineries, according to Rick Manner, an official with KBC Advanced Technologies.

Manner, who spoke at an NPRA Q&A session on hydroprocessing principles and practices, said there was often room for improvement on hydrogen plant operations at a typical refinery.

“Hydrogen management is often given low priority,” Manner said. “People are too busy, overburdened with other responsibilities, or not properly trained on how to run hydrogen plants or hydrogen systems.

“Quite often, they get extremely low priority. There’s some very low-hanging fruit on what to fix.”

In particular, optimizing hydrogen use could be very attractive for high-margin units where crude selection is limited by hydrogen availability.

“When you’re screening heavy crudes, you see this crude is low-margin or high-margin but you don’t see why,” Manner said. “You can find out.”

Hydrogen management studies can help companies identify and relieve constraints and improve hydrogen utilization, he noted.

Manner said that some refinery operators needed to change their outlook toward such maintenance costs.

“Some of these guys don’t want to lose money [on maintenance] even if it costs 10 times that in profitability,” he said. “It can be a major problem.”

“I understand it’s a difficult decision for a manager to make to have a turnaround, but sometimes you need to bite the bullet and accept that you’re not making a lot of money.”