"Fouling is the build up of oil deposits on tubes in heat exchangers. Refiners spend $4.5 billion worldwide to clean up refineries, resulting in shutdowns and serious health and safety issues because of the need to safely dispose of toxic material from the tubes. Security of oil supplies also is threatened when refineries are offline.
Refineries suffering fouling have reduced throughput and are inefficient because they waste more energy in converting oil into fuel products. Consequently there are increased carbon emissions. "Up to 10% of refinery's carbon footprint is from fouling in preheating trains," Pugh said, adding that oil needs an extra blast in the refinery's furnace prior to distillation because of fouling.
Pugh recommended that the oil industry shares resources to solve the problem with an emphasis on technology to design new types of heat exchangers, hydrotreaters, and FCC units."
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