Challenge
Petroleum coke (often abbreviated Pet coke or petcoke) is a carbonaceous solid derived from oil refinery coker units or other cracking processes. Petroleum coke is typically created in a drum and solidifies. Once the products cooling cycle is complete, the coke is hydraulically cut from the drum and transported to a pad or pit, where the water then separates from the coke. It then can be loaded to barge or railcar for shipping to its next destination.
Approach
With increasing environmental pressures, a new solution was sought for eliminating the coking pits and pads, as the run off from the evaporative dewatering process was not environmentally friendly. Plus, the time that it took to dewater the pet coke was significant, causing significant delay and multiple handling points between cutting and shipment.
Solution
GK’s Engineered Solutions Group developed a patented single line vibratory dewatering process which dewaters and transports the pet coke directly from the coking process to the shipping load point, which reduced staging steps from three times per day to potentially one per day, with less environmental risk. GK’s Engineered Products Group delivered the final product in less than 9 months.
Results
By implementing GK’s vibratory dewatering system, the end customer eliminated multiple handling points, eliminated their large dewatering pad, and increased overall capacity by 50%. With multiple units, redundancy was achieved for 100% uptime performance.
