ital costs for the base-case HDRD plant (58 million L/year or1000 bbl/day) is shown in Fig. 2.
The plant was designed to have 100% redundancy for all process
equipment. By having two identical process trains, the plant does
not need to shut down for most maintenance, and the catalyst in
one reactor can be regenerated using hydrogen reduction while
the other reactor is online. The quantity of catalyst used in this
study was scaled-up based on the catalyst loading in AARD’s study
[43] and catalyst cost quotes for 10% Pd on activated carbon were
obtained from an industry vendor – Johnson Matthey. The cost
quotes were broken into two components – fabrication cost and
Pd cost. The fabrication cost was $71.85/kg [57] and the Pd cost
was based on the current market price of Pd – $19,754/kg as of
November 17, 2011 [58].
Although the catalyst can be regenerated to a certain extent onsite,
at some point in time the catalyst will become fouled and
must be returned to the manufacturer for re-fabrication [57]. The
catalyst lifetime is dependent on many factors but one of the
important factors is whether a solvent (e.g. supercritical hexane)
is used in the hydroprocessing reactor [59].With supercritical hexane,
the catalyst can be expected to last in this application for
approximately 1–2 years; without supercritical hexane, the catalyst
may only last 6 months [59]. In this study, a catalyst lifetime
of 1 year was used. When the catalyst is returned to the manufacturer,
approximately 96–97% of the Pd is recovered so the HDRD
plant would only need to pay for the cost of top-up Pd, fabrication,
and shipping [57]. The total capital costs for the range of processing
plant sizes considered in this study are shown in Fig. 3 for a
plant that uses canola oil as a feedstock.
The capital cost estimates developed in this study for a given
flow rate of feedstock were much higher than the estimates shown