Q&A Rich-Amine Letdown: A

Severe-Service Application
n Rich-amine letdown valves are found in gas processing plants or
gas applications, and also in refineries. The purpose of these valves
is to pull out contaminants with gases generating hydrogen sulfide.
Q What is amine? A. No, it’s a flashing issue.
A. Amine is just something they go out and buy; Q. Okay, the multi-constituent gas is desolved in
it’s a chemical. the amine and is now called rich amine. So it
Q. So you have a storage tank with amine in goes through the valve.
it, and you’re pumping natural gas to the A. Through the valve. What you are trying to
bottom? accomplish is to get all these gases to flash
A. I run the amine from the storage tank through off the liquid. I’m letting this stuff down to a
a pump. It goes into the top of the column, flash tank where I want the bad gases to come
natural gas comes into the bottom of that out. They collect these gases and send them
same column, and as the liquid falls, the gas somewhere else to be dealt with. The amine
percolates up to run over one another. Then collected from the flash tank is now cleaned
what happens is the amine takes out all the again—it’s lean again—and it gets recirculated
caustics, the carbon dioxides, the hydrogen back to the pump and back to the top of the
sulfites and everything out of the fluid, so when column, through the loop again.
gas comes out of the top it’s nice and clean. Because the vapor pressure is so high
That’s what they do in refineries, and there are coming into the valve, that tends to push
two valves. The rich-amine valve is the one on out the valve size. If you use a small vapor
the bottom of the column and the valve on pressure, you would think you need a small
the top is just a pump that has a reset valve valve, and more importantly, it tends to be a
around it where the pumping is nice and clean very violent process because of this.
(referred to as lean and mean). It’s a reset valve Q. So how would somebody go about getting the
like any we deal with—it’s nothing special. right vapor pressure?
Q. So, okay, rich amine comes out of the bottom A. What we always assume is just PV = P1. That’s
and the first valve it sees is? probably overly conservative, but we know at
A. The rich-amine level control valve, the one we that point the valve will be sized correctly.
are talking about. We have yet to have a customer give us an
Q. And obviously, the purpose of this valve is to answer to the question, “What is the vapor
keep the level of liquid in the tank at a certain pressure?” The problems that we see most are
point so you strip the gas correctly. catastrophic failures. What they typically use
A. That’s right. in this application is a very simple—usually
Q. This valve is keeping the level of liquid in there. [a] Fisher valve used just to pour the cage.
Is it always open? Sometimes [they] use the CAV 3 style cage—
A. It’s always open as long as the system is in use. dropvolt cage—and what we see is that
The fluid comes through this valve and goes to it vibrates a lot, to the point where they
the base of the flash tank will get catastrophic failure of the plug-stem
Q. Is the inside of the storage tank liquid or gas connection.
saturation? Q. So the key here is if you were normally talking
A. Both; the pressure is P1. about a flashing service, you would expect to
Q. Do you have any solids that are formed in the see erosive damage.
process as well? A. That’s true. We see some of that but we do
A. In general, no. not see a lot of that. That’s not the failure
Q. Multi-phase constituence? mechanism, it is a catastrophic failure.
A. Most definitely. Q. Which means the degree of energy that
Q. Is liquid the only thing that enters? comes out of that fluid is producing a high
A. Well, as I say, vapor pressure and P1 are one mechanical vibration, or, if you will, something
and the same. that produces a catastrophic failure.
Q. So is cavitation a problem? A. That’s exactly it—to the point where the

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 Williamsfield service guys can almost predict when their
Fisher valves are going to fail. They know they get a
certain number of weeks before they fail.
Q. Why wouldn’t Fisher move up and offer a CAV4 for
example?
A. I suspect the reason for that is capacity. CAV4 is very
limited on capacity, just like a Lincoln Log is limited on
capacity for a number of stages. So as you go to more
and more stages, you get a bigger and bigger valve.
These things tend to require a lot of CV for a valve sizing.
Q. What’s the cost associated with having a bad rich-amine
level control valve?
A. If the failure is catastrophic, when it fails it shuts the
whole train down. From what I’ve seen, they do not
generally have parallel valves where you can shut them
down and use another one.
Q. And if they lose a train, what’s the value of that for a day?
A. If they have five trains in the plant—[and] let’s assume
they are all the same size—you obviously loose 1/5th of
your capacity. Let’s just say that the cost of the problem
will typically be a loss of ability for the plant to perform
its duty. A good estimate would be, for one valve, 40,000
standard cubic feet per day.
That’s, say, in a small plant. It probably takes them—if
they are ready for it—a minimum of 4 hours to replace
the valves [and] get everything back on line. Of course,
these things don’t fail at 10 o’clock in the morning when
you are sitting there with the valve next to it. They fail
in the middle of the night when everybody is at home
asleep, so hours add up fast.
Q. So, what’s the value brought by CCI?
A. The real value is reliability. The fact that the valves don’t
break down means they don’t have to shut the train down
on a regular basis. Williamsfield is at the point with the
Fisher valves where after x number of weeks with the
Fisher valves, they will shut the train down and they will
put a spare valve in line because they know it’s gonna fail
before much longer.
Q. What would be a good size refinery?
A. I’d say anything about 150M on up would be a place
worth talking to.
Q. If you’ve got a dozen people working there, it’s probably
2 CCI News: Rich Amine Letdown—A Severe-Service Application | 420
a lot? How do you help them do AR for, let’s say, $100,000
to $200,000? Won’t that be above his limit? Will he buy
one-offs?
A. They probably buy one-offs; it depends on how well
you know the guy and how much he really wants your
product. In the case of Williamsfield service, their guys
can sign for up to $10,000 without getting any other
approvals. So we get 3 purchase orders for one valve. We
sell them a body, we sell them an internal skate and we
sell them a top.
Q. So we’ll be creative to work with the guy under his limit.
A. Most definitely; that’s what it takes to get an order.
Q. So, if you send a guy in to a 150M standard cubic feet
per day processing plant, at an order of magnitude, how
much business would you expect would be there if you
did all the valves?
A. $250,000 to $500,000.
Q. Does this go by any other name other than letdown rich-
amine control?
A. Let’s see. It probably does. That’s one thing that definitely
needs to be mentioned. You’ll hear multiple terms for this
stuff. It’s called amine, it’s called MEADEA and it’s got
101 different trade names. It’s all the same stuff. Don’t
differentiate between different names.
Q. Is there really a client-level market?
A. As near as I can see, yes. I’ve talked to one of the
engineering houses, which build the stripping loops, a
company called TPA in Dallas. Their opinion is that it’s not
a severe- service application. They feel they don’t need
valves like this. We’ve also talked to the company that
supplied Williams with theirs, some company in Denver,
I can’t remember the name now. They more or less had
the same feelings, yet Williams has problems all the time.
We’ve seen numerous problems with the MX plants in
Mexico with these same valves. So, with my experience,
the company supplying the loops doesn’t see the need for
anything more than a simple Fisher valve, and yet we’re
seeing failures left and right in the field.
Q. So it’s a substantial amount of plant-level business.
A. If you’re pursuing this portion of business, you can find
100 valves per year for this application without too much
trouble.
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