Recovering Flare Gas Energy - A Different Approach

Most petrochemical complexes and oil refineries have systems to collect and dispose of waste gases. Usually this is done by burning in a flare. Some installations recover these gases by compressing them into their fuel system. Because SunOlin shares its flare system with a neighboring oil refinery, changes to the flare system operation could have far-reaching impact on both plants. Therefore, a flare gas recovery system was designed and installed so that waste gases can be burned directly in a steam boiler. This was done for both safety and operational reasons. This presented a number of interesting design and operating problems which are discussed in this paper