A salt extraction operation needed to move shortly from an onshore to an offshore website supplied by 5 km of pipework. The company turned to move management partner Celeros to help meet the distinctive circumstances encountered at the new salt properly.
Overview of the two new water injection pumps for single and parallel operation, following set up and commissioning at the Frisia Zout BV website.
A new salt extraction plant off the north coast of Holland has been introduced online ahead of schedule, stopping a possible halt in production when the prevailing onshore properly developed points. Frisia Zout BV, part of K+S Minerals and Agriculture GmbH, was capable of overcome the time and technical challenges of accelerating the project by working in partnership with Celeros Flow Technology (Celeros FT).
The bulk of the salt produced by Frisia Zout BV goes loose to a 40,000-tonne storage facility for delivery in bulk to industry. The remainder is packed in smaller portions for use in meals manufacturing or made into cubes for water purification.
The salt is extracted under licence from the Dutch authorities. The existing borehole licence
allowed K+S to extract salt from underground on the mainland. Due to regulatory changes, the brand new licence would only allow extraction from subsea sources off the coast. Consequently, a new borehole and related plant was required at the Frisia Zout BV website.
New challenges
K+S started planning for a model new pump building in 2017, and construction started in April 2020 with the purpose of bringing it onstream before the prevailing extraction licence expired at the end of 2021. However, unexpected difficulties arose with the present onshore nicely, which meant that production would cease before anticipated. To bridge the hole, Frisia Zout BV began bringing in salt water by tanker, however this was an costly different. As a result, it turned imperative to bring the brand new offshore nicely onstream as soon as attainable.
Time pressures weren’t the only challenges the corporate confronted. Due to the natural geology, the extraction path to the brand new offshore useful resource was not a straight bore: it changed path twice before reaching the salt deposits. In truth, the new plant is fed by one of the deepest wells in the world and has 5 km of pipework beyond the water injection pumps. As a result, the process water has to be pumped in at high pressure (250 barg) and at a excessive circulate rate (450 m3/h) to extract the quantity of salt required, making the choice of pumps crucial to success.
Total resolution
Frisia Zout BV has a protracted and established relationship with Celeros FT by way of the ClydeUnion Pumps brand, based not solely on the high quality of ITS OEM pumps but additionally on its capability to reply rapidly to any operational points. The company turned to its trusted circulate control associate once once more for help in assembly the unique circumstances encountered at the new salt well.
Celeros FT brand ClydeUnion Pumps assessed the flow requirements for the water injection process at the new plant and verified that CUP-BB3 pumps could possibly be made to meet requirements. The pumps have been specified with Duplex stainless-steel casings as a outcome of they would be working in a salt-laden setting. Celeros FT manufactured, provided, installed and commissioned the mission-critical pumps for injecting water into the new offshore salt cavern, meeting unusual requirements for high stress and high move rates. In addition, they supported Frisia Zout BV in bringing an older pump again into service as a spare: assessing it and upgrading the casing to make sure it met the new obligation requirements.
Jouk Riemer, challenge manager for Frisia Zout BV, explained: “We have used CUP-BB3 pumps prior to now and found that their multistage centrifugal design gives better performance, in comparability with plunger pumps, for this software. We needed to make use of them again for the new venture. The Celeros FT staff responded to the challenges magnificently, using their engineering experience to determine the most effective resolution to meet the pressure and move charges we required, delivering the pump skids to satisfy the model new construction schedule and serving to us maintain the venture on observe.”
Future assured
The new salt extraction plant got here online in December 2020. Its CUP-BB3 pumps meet the excessive stress and move rates required for the appliance and may run in parallel, which has improved productivity. The availability of a spare pump provides extra confidence that manufacturing downtime might be minimal. The company’s capacity to fulfill the accelerated project deadline is especially spectacular when you consider that the Covid-19 pandemic was already affecting provides of materials and elements. The Celeros FT group worked hard to ensure that this did not have any impact on their buyer.
Celeros FT also supplied specialist engineering experience throughout the installation and commissioning phase and will continue to ensure the pumps function satisfactorily throughout the plant’s 15-year lifespan, though the pump building may be required to serve a couple of properly in future as demand for K+S excessive purity salt continues to grow. Easy substitute of wear components and ongoing service assist from Celeros FT will ensure that the BB3 pumps continue to meet operational parameters throughout the extraction plant’s lifetime.
Riemer said: “The combination of high quality OEM tools and sensible engineering expertise provided by Celeros Flow Technology was instrumental in delivering this venture forward of time. I’m convinced it will have taken lots longer to get what we required from another pump producer. The company’s responsiveness was crucial in assembly our revised deadline, decreasing costs and maintaining extraction at this site viable.” Riemer concluded: “This is the first offshore extraction well we’ve developed however it has been a largely positive experience due to Celeros Flow Technology. เกจวัดแรงดันsumo introduced invaluable engineering experience and specialist pump information to this venture and are a fundamental part of its success.”
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