Toyo Engineering Corporation (TOYO, President and CEO Kiyoshi Nakao) has completed construction for a SUPERHIDIC® energy saving distillation system project awarded from Maruzen Petrochemical Co., Ltd. This system has achieved an energy saving of over 50% compared with conventional distillation.
It was designed with the aim of providing large energy savings for the MEK production plant at Maruzen Petrochemical in Chiba Prefecture, and is the first commercialized SUPERHIDIC® system. In 2014, TOYO was awarded the project and executed engineering, procurement of equipment and materials, construction and commissioning assistance.
SUPERHIDIC® is the technology to reduce the amount of energy used in the distillation, a unit operation widely applied in oil refineries and petrochemical plants. It has been researched for many years by companies, universities and research institutions around the world and TOYO is the first to commercialize it. The distillation operation that is generally used in oil refineries and petrochemical plants is a thermal energy intensive operation, where the bottom of distillation towers is heated using a reboiler and, at the same time, overhead gas is cooled using a condenser. Additionally a lot of CO2 is discharged because steam and fuel oil are used as heating resource for a reboiler. To apply SUPERHIDIC® in this operation, it enables not only to saves energy but also directly contributes to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.
Based on the success of this project, TOYO is planning to expand the commercialization of SUPERHIDIC®, and aims to contribute to saving energy at oil refineries and petrochemical plants, lowering operational expenses, and further reducing the burden on the global environment.
Background of development and commercialization for SUPERHIDIC®
Advancing the energy-saving concept of Heat Integrated Distillation Column (HIDiC) and applying well proven distillation and heat-transfer technologies, TOYO developed SUPERHIDIC® to realize very high energy-saving performance by utilizing the results from collaborative research with The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) .