Page 33 - SAPREF 50 year

A LION roars on schedule
In the late 1990s, work started on investigating the feasibility of expanding the capacity of the refinery, and improving the quality of the fuels made at SAPREF. In early 2002, a Basis of Design team was formed. The team included people like Siva Govender, Pat Boddy, Mbulelo Yokwe and Wim van den Bosch. This marked the birth of Project LION (Large Increase in Octane Number), also known as Cleaner Fuels 1 (CF1). The Project was led by Tjalling Terpstra, who is also leading the CF2 project.
LION was built mostly on the old
CD1 site. The project was SAPREF’s • response to an instruction from the Department of Minerals and Energy
which required petrol to be lead- • free and the sulphur in both petrol and diesel
to be reduced to 500 parts per million (one-
sixth of the then value of sulphur in diesel),
by 1 January 2006. This fitted neatly with the • strategies of the shareholders, BP and Shell,
who both wanted to produce more enviro-
friendly fuel.
Some of the team members who worked on the LION Project.
The project involved:
The building of a fourth reactor to increase the octane-generating capacity of the platformer.
The installation of a UOP Penex/DIH
unit, an isomerisation plant to treat light gasoline and significantly increase the octane number of this stream.
Increasing the purity of the hydrogen stream from the platformer by the construction of a pressure swing absorber (PSA) unit.
LION by numbers
The LION project in 2004-5 used 312 piles, 4000 cubic metres of concrete, 900 tons of steel, 24km of pipe joined with 6,3km of welds, 360km of cable, more than 90 pieces of mechanical equipment, controlled by 460 instruments. It all arrived on time, in the
“right sequence and fitted remarkably well, as shown on 7296 engineering drawings.
After a flawless start-up, the project achieved on-spec product rundown
to storage on 1 December 2005. By
this date, 1,8 million hours had been worked on the project — ”with no lost time injuries among the 1000 people, on average, on the site.
Some of the many people who delivered a world- class project at SAPREF in 2005.
COMMEMORATING 50 YEARS OF EXCELLENCE
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