GOTAR Defeats Iron Oxides
At GOTAR, we’ve worked in some pretty harsh climates. Cleaning in any rough weather can be a challenge, but working in places like North Pole, Alaska can add its own special dimension to the rigors at hand. Though it is 1,700 miles from the actual North Pole, the town of North Pole still gets pretty cold (the average low in December is -31°C). We received a call from the Williams Alaska Petroleum to clean an extraction unit and deoxidize production lines at one of the largest petroleum refineries in Alaska. The massive facility processes 60,000 barrels of various products including jet fuel, naphtha, heating fuel, diesel, heavy atmospheric gasoil, asphalt, and of course gasoline. The refinery had been struggling for an extended period with iron oxides deposits in various lines of production at the extraction unit.
At GOTAR, we know that corrosion is an unpleasant fact. Whenever iron and oxygen interact, you are going to have some natural decaying. This decay process generates iron oxides (Fe2O3). Iron oxides can be quite hard to remove, especially when concentrated in solid deposits all along a piping system. However, in this case, the scourge that is iron oxides was no match for GOTAR-D.
The usual GOTAR procedure of soaking and circulation cycles was followed. The two lines (naphtha and kerosene) were cleaned one after the other. After the procedure was completed, we had removed 5.6 metric tons of iron oxides from the kerosene line and 5.1 metric tons from the naphtha line. In all we used 22,000 gallons of our tough-handling, environmental friendly GOTAR-D to get the job done. This was just another job for us, but for the folks at Williams Alaska Petroleum it was a game changer. If you think your facility is losing critical production capability to iron oxides, contact GOTAR today and let us clean it up in no time at all.
