Customer overview: P66's Wood River refinery is a medium sized plant, located near St. Louis MO, USA. The refinery processes a mix of light, low-sulfur; heavy, high-sulfur; and high-acid crude oils. Wood River receives Canadian and domestic crude oils, including from U.S.- advantaged sources, and other foreign crude oil. The refinery produces a high percentage of transportation fuels, such as gasoline, diesel and aviation fuels. Other products include petrochemical feedstocks, asphalt and coke. Its operations consist of two fluid catalytic cracking units, alkylation, hydrocracking, two delayed coking units, naphtha reforming, hydro-treating and sulfur recovery. Finished products leave Wood River through pipelines and by rail, barge and truck.
Application challenges: Like several other refineries in the USA, P66 Wood River is under a consent decree and is in transition from older valve technology (metal seated plug valves, and gate valves) to newer sleeve plug valve technology for their Sulfuric Alkylation Unit. In addition to seeking newer valve technologies to improve compliance to their consent decree, and shut off integrity, they were also seeking an upgrade from Alloy 20 CN7M for these valves for better resistance to inter-granular cracking due to sulfuric acid exposure.
Why we won: Crane's sales engineer engaged with P66's Environmental Compliance and Leak Detection and Repair (LDAR) manager to understand their new valve technology requirements and provide the test certificates and data required by the consent decree. Simultaneously, the sales engineer was negotiating material specifications with the Alkylation Unit engineer. P66's initial request was for a newer Alloy 20 spec, ASTM A990 CN3MCu. While possible to produce this material, the minimum economical lot size of this material (nearly 5 metric tons) did not align well with P66's purchasing plan. Crane was able to propose a grade of Hastelloy (CW6M) which had a similar corrosion resistant properties and a smaller minimum economical lot size, which enabled expedited delivery of the first 3 shipments of valves that were required in well under normal lead times. Product details: The winning product was the Xomox XP3, with CW6M body, CW6M plug assembly, and PTFE sleeve, in sizes from ½" thru 10". Xomox's business line manager provided great support to the sales engineer throughout the sales process, providing various details on both product design and critical lead times within the supply chain.
Scope of order etc. The total win for this project was just over $1.6M. Orders began to flow 3 to 4 months after the Sales Engineers first contact with the customer on this project. The first orders received were for roughly $150k for a reactor replacement project, followed by another order for roughly $183k and then another order for $1.1M, and another for $207k for the refinery's fall 2020 turn-around.
