Shell Chemicals

Shell Chemicals is one of the world leaders in base chemicals (lower olefins and aromatics) and intermediates (like solvents, ethylene oxide, olefins, phenol). For each of these products, Shell Chemicals ranks among the top three largest producers.

The Stanlow plant production includes benzene (240 ktpa), toluene (80 ktpa), ethylbenzene (160 ktpa), propylene (200 ktpa) and alpha olefins (330 ktpa). It is close to the sites of Shell UK Oil Products, Shell Lubricants, Shell's Thornton Research Centre, Associated Octel and other major petrochemical companies.

Shell Chemicals in Stanlow had to replace their existing Cold Softened Water production units, that supplied both the Chemicals Manufacturing Complex and the Oil Refinery.

Shell wished to put the operation and maintenance of the softened water services into the hands of an experienced operator allowing their management to spend its time and energy on its core business.

Veolia Water offered a compact containerized filtration and softening system providing Shell with flexibility to meet future site developments and demands.

The contract initially featured: - containerized streams with adequate on site redundancy to meet production peaks during start-up and abnormal conditions on the complex - compact installation that could be set up alongside the existing plant to process a total of 3,500 m3/d with a treated water quality of less than 2 ppm total hardness - operation and maintenance of the plant over a minimum 10 year service period. This solution allows Shell Chemicals management team to reduce its involvement to high level supervision of this non-core function.

Experience of the dramatic changes in raw water quality from the River Dee has resulted in an additional clarification stage being added to the treatment which utilises the Actiflo equipment, a patented process of Veolia Water.

This high rate clarifier has stabilised the feed conditions to the cold softened water plant and added additional security of supply which has enabled Shell to re-use part of their water storage capacity for other purposes, thus saving them capital investment.