The heat exchangers were typically cleaned of solid hydrocarbon sludges by removing the bundle and performing mechanical high-pressure water blasting. The process traditionally took 5 days to complete due to the heavy fouling associated with Canadian crude.

The scope consisted of several banks of LVGO service heat exchangers. The banks were a combination of shell and tube as well as plate exchangers.

Using our FQE Solvent-H chemistry in three separate circulation loops, the exchangers were flushed within a 12-hour period and saved over 4 days of outage time. The exchangers were brought back online at full throughput making this a successful maintenance program. Based on the plant operating capacity, this would have recovered at least 100,000 bbl. of production.