Ammonia KBR Purifier Process by Kellogg Brown & Root

To produce ammonia from hydrocarbon feedstocks and air.

Ammonia KBR Purifier Process

The key features of the KBR Purifier process are mild primary reforming, secondary reforming with excess air, cryogenic purification of syngas, and synthesis of ammonia over magnetite catalyst in a horizontal converter.

Desulfurized feed is reacted with steam in the primary reformer (1) with an exit temperature of about 700°C. Primary reformer effluent is reacted with excess air in the secondary reformer (2) with an exit temperature of about 900°C. The air compressor is normally a gas-driven turbine (3). Turbine exhaust is fed to the primary reformer and used as preheated combustion air. An alternative to the above described conventional reforming is to use KBR’s reforming exchanger system (KRES), as described in KBR’s Purifierplus ammonia process.

Secondary reformer exit gas is cooled by generating high-pressure steam (4). The shift reaction is carried out in two catalytic steps—hightemperature (5) and low-temperature shift (6). Carbon dioxide removal (7) uses licensed processes. Following CO2 removal, residual carbon oxides are converted to methane in the methanator (8). Methanator effluent is cooled, and water is separated (9) before the raw gas is dried (10).

Dried synthesis gas flows to the cryogenic purifier (11), where it is cooled by feed/effluent heat exchange and fed to a rectifier. The syngas is purified in the rectifier column, producing a column overhead that is essentially a 75:25 ratio of hydrogen and nitrogen. The column bottoms is a waste gas that contains unconverted methane from the reforming section, excess nitrogen and argon. Both overhead and bottoms are reheated in the feed/effluent exchanger. The waste gas stream is used to regenerate the dryers and then is burned as fuel in the primary reformer.

A small, low-speed expander provides the net refrigeration. The purified syngas is compressed in the syngas compressor (12), mixed with the loop-cycle stream and fed to the converter (13). Converter effluent is cooled and then chilled by ammonia refrigeration. Ammonia product is separated (14) from unreacted syngas. Unreacted syngas is recycled back to the syngas compressor. A small purge is scrubbed with water (15) and recycled to the dryers.

Licensor: Kellogg Brown & Root, LLC

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