Honeywell UOP has won two separate contracts within a month from Chinese firms to supply a total of nine Polybed pressure swing adsorption (PSA) units for producing high-purity hydrogen.

The first agreement is with Shenghong Petrochemical for five units as part of a new refinery complex in Lianyuangang in Jiangsu province. The second deal is with Zhejiang Petrochemical Company (ZPC), which has signed up for four Polybed systems for the second-phase of its integrated refining and petrochemical complex in Zhoushan, Zhejiang province.

UOP has previously won contracts from ZPC for technology licensing, engineering design and catalysts for the first two phases of the complex. In the first phase of the project announced in 2017, ZPC selected Honeywell UOP technologies for hydroprocessing and heavy oil upgrading, and to make aromatics.

For the second phase, Honeywell UOP was contracted in January 2019 to supply a wide range of technology licenses, engineering design, key equipment, catalysts and adsorbents, to more than double aromatics capacity. The complex will process 20 million t/y of crude oil to produce another 6 million t/y of aromatics. An onstream date has not been revealed.

When completed, the plant will be the largest-crude-to-chemicals complex in China, with more than 50% of crude converting to petrochemicals, UOP said, adding that it will help the country to move closer to  self-sufficiency in paraxylene while also serving as a major new source of propylene jet fuel and more.

“High-purity hydrogen is a critical element in the efficient operation of these complexes because all of the conversion technologies in them depend on it,” explained Bryan Glover, Honeywell UOP’s vice president and general manager, petrochemicals & refining technologies.

The PSA process uses proprietary UOP adsorbents to remove impurities at high pressure from hydrogen-containing process streams, allowing the gas to be recovered and upgraded to more than 99.9% purity to meet refining needs.

In addition to recovering and purifying hydrogen from steam reformers and refinery off-gases, the Polybed PSA system can be used to produce hydrogen from other sources such as ethylene offgas, methanol offgas and partial-oxidation synthesis gas.

Polybed PSA systems are skid-mounted modular units that UOP said enable quick and efficient installation to reduce cost and downtime.