GAIL (Gas Authority of India Limited) owns and operates a gas based Petrochemical Complex at Pata, a town roughly 100 km west of Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh in India.  This complex is the first gas based, landlocked petrochemical complex in India. GAIL has ‘Sclairtech’ solution polymerization process licensed from Nova Chemicals, Canada to produce LLDPE and HDPE, with a  capacity of 2,10,000 tons p.a. and has two slurry based polymerization processes licensed from  Mitsui Chemicals, Japan to produce HDPE, each with a  capacity of 1,00,000 tons p.a.  It also uses new gas phase Unipol PE Process of  Univation Technology, USA, with a capacity of 400,000 tons p.a. to produce HDPE/LLDPE.

 

There was a tender from GAIL, Pata, for a hazardous waste incinerator to burn activated carbon. This is a process waste and quite fluffy and voluminous. We took part in the tender and won the contract against stiff competition from two other Indian suppliers.

 

GAIL had appointed MECON of Ranchi as engineering consultants. Before we could start production, detailed engineering had to be done in collaboration with MECON and it took quite a few revisions of documents being exchanged between consultant, client and ourselves before we could obtain full approval.  Eventually all documents were approved by MECON and by GAIL and we went about the procurement and production.

 

The design chosen was a BP model of 100 kg/h with wet scrubber and 30 m

stack. The reason for this was that the BP is a triple chamber incinerator with a long residence time for the flue gas and its retort type construction and unique design helped achieve good emissions and combustion before the flue gas gets scrubbed.  

 

There were also some non-standard features of this incinerator system which included:

• A special loading system in the form of a bucket elevator to enable continuous feeding of the hazardous waste.

• Complete turnkey solution including civil work, street lighting along with a massive 4-5 m diameter chimney foundation base.

• Hazardous area rating for electrical and instrumentation complying to Zone 2.

• Electrical Ex’d’ panel from Baliga Chennai.

• Fire detection and alarm system.

• Automatic hot ash removal system using a screw conveyor.

• Cooling tower for scrubber water.

 

The equipment was subject to inspection by the client and MECON at various stages. Once shipping clearance was given, it was despatched to Pata, where our team went, installed and commissioned it to the satisfaction of the end user.

 

The system has been working since 2009 and doing the job for which it was designed.  We were happy to be part of a challenging project that included turnkey execution including civil work and stringent verification of every step in the process of incinerator design, manufacture, supply and installation.