2016 - Qatar Petroleum, Dukhan Sulphur Recovery Unit, Qatar
Summary
The Dukhan Sulphur Recovery Unit (SRU) is a critical facility in Qatar Petroleum’s operations, designed to process and recover sulphur from gas streams while ensuring compliance with environmental regulations. The unit plays a vital role in reducing emissions and improving overall process efficiency. Given the aggressive process conditions and the need for continuous operation, ensuring high reliability and maintainability of the system was essential.
Challanges
One of the primary challenges was maintaining system availability in the face of high-temperature and corrosive environments, which significantly impact equipment lifespan and performance. The sulphur recovery process involves complex thermal and catalytic reactions, requiring robust maintenance strategies to prevent unplanned shutdowns. Additionally, optimizing the maintenance schedule while ensuring environmental compliance was crucial.
Solution
Conducted a detailed Failure Modes, Effects, and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) to identify highrisk components within the sulphur recovery process. This analysis helped prioritize maintenance efforts on critical equipment such as reaction furnaces, waste heat boilers, and sulphur condensers.
Developed a Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) program, aligning maintenance strategies with operational risks and performance objectives. This included identifying condition-based maintenance opportunities for key process units.
Implemented a Risk-Based Inspection (RBI) approach, ensuring that inspection efforts were focused on high-risk components prone to corrosion and thermal degradation. By leveraging industry best practices, the RBI strategy optimized resource allocation while minimizing unnecessary inspections.
Conducted spare parts optimization studies, ensuring that essential components were available when needed, without excessive stockpiling. This strategy balanced cost efficiency with operational readiness.
Led cost-benefit analysis for maintenance strategies, ensuring that predictive maintenance investments were justified by long-term reliability improvements.
Facilitated root cause analysis (RCA) workshops to investigate historical failures and prevent recurrence through targeted design improvements and procedural changes.
