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[theleftcoast]

Hello,

I am working on my senior design project and need some help with the preliminary economic evaluation. The column overhead we have to work with contains mostly C4-C6 with some C2, C3, and C7 and has 600 ppmw sulfur which is in the form of straight chain mercaptan compounds. The feed stream has to be broken into a butane stream and naphtha stream (C5 - C7) which a maximum sulfur limit of 1 ppmw each (a pretty low target, from what I understand). The processes I am evaluating for removing sulfur to this level are Hydrotreating and the Merox extraction process but I am having a hard time finding information related to the costs associated with each. The specific numbers I need are listed below.

- Cost of licensing the Merox Process
- Cost of Merox catalyst
- The cost of hydrotreating catalyst
- The performance losses (if any) expected for a Merox unit over time.
- The performance losses due to catalyst fouling and poisoning expected for hydrotreating catalyst over time.
- The cost of hydrogen
- The value of H2S streams as feed to a Sulfur plant
- The value of Butane and naptha streams in a refinery (Is there a difference between market values for these chemicals and "value" of these streams in the refinery before sale?)

I have a pretty good idea of how to do a simple assessment of a hydrotreater. My approach will be to use published LHSV values to evaluate the size of the reactor and heat/material balances to determine things such as H2 consumption, heat duties for feed preheating and cooling, etc. The hard part will be evaluating the Merox process because I don't really understand the reactor sizes and catalyst requirements for the process well enough to generate a good numbers for comparison of Merox vs. Hydrotreating.

Looking through UOP's website for data on the Merox process, I only came up with brochures or general descriptions of the process with no real data that I could use. For hydrotreating catalyst data and pricing, I looked through several vendor websites and couldn't find any real data. Literature searches for "Deep Desulfurization", "Light Naphtha Desulfurization" and review articles have mostly resulted in papers about novel catalysts for use in hydrotreaters that don't contain the data I need.

Does anybody have catalyst data sheets, equipment data sheets, or any similar resources that can help me? Right now, I am looking for information that will help me evaluate the cost of processing my streams. More detailed equipment design will come after I do a preliminary evaluation of several plant layouts to determine a satisfactory overall process flowsheet. I am not trying to get out of doing my assignment and am not being lazy here, I just have not been able to find some of the critical information I need for evaluation.

Thanks in advance for any replies! Any and all help is much appreciated.