Introduction:

The Cienfuegos Refinery S.A presents high levels of liquid emissions to the environment, which will be aggravated by the implementation of new process units in Phase 1 of the Expansion Project. The foregoing exposed leads to non-compliance with the Cuban emissions standard (NC-521, 2007).

Objective:

Given this situation, the purpose of this work was to evaluate opportunities for operational improvements in the processes that generate alkaline sulphureous residuals in Refinery Cienfuegos S.A that allow a reduction in the same in the absence of spent soda treatment.

Materials y Methods:

For this research, a methodology was proposed that allowed identifying and evaluating opportunities for improvement in the processes studied. A group of experts was selected to analyze these opportunities for improvement using the Delphi method, the Cause-Effect Diagram was created to investigate the causes that cause the emissions of spent caustic. Based on technical-economic criteria, opportunities for process improvements were identified.

Results y Discussion:

It is possible to reduce the production of alkaline sulphureous residuals to 190 L/h from modifications in the caustic treatment units and the control of the quality parameters of both the raw material and the final product is improved in each process.

Conclusions:

Spent caustic can be reduced by making interconnections to treat LPG with caustic in the gas fractionation plant and the caustic flow used in the Merox plant can be decreased. Alkaline sulphureous decrease from 540 to 190 L/h with the proposed variants, saving $ 626 795.28 per month.

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