Jiuhua Construction wins bid for Zhejiang’s 400,000-ton caprolactam hydrogen production upgrade and by-product ammonia improvement project

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Jiuhua Construction won the bid for the hydrogen production upgrade and by-product ammonia improvement project at Zhejiang Balin Hengyi Caprolactam Co., Ltd. Author/Source: Gasification World Date: 2021-02-24 Clicks: 43 Recently, China National Ninth Engineering Corporation won the bid for the construction and installation work related to the purification and synthesis phases of this project. The project is located in the Linjiang Industrial Park, Xiaoshan District, Hangzhou City, Zhejiang Province. Building on an existing production facility with a capacity of 500,000 tons per year for caprolactam, it is planned to use advanced coal chemical technologies to construct a new hydrogen production unit with a capacity of 50,000 Nm3/h. This unit will also generate 300,000 tons per year of synthetic ammonia, along with a supporting air separation unit capable of producing 60,000 Nm3/h of oxygen. The construction site for the 400,000-ton/year caprolactam capacity expansion project at Zhejiang Baling Hengyi is located in the Linjiang area of the Dajiangdong Industrial Cluster in Hangzhou, with a total investment of 2,478.85 million yuan. Construction content and scale: This project adds a production capacity of 200,000 tons per year for caprolactam; it is a renovation and expansion project. The project is constructed in two phases. The first phase utilizes the existing benzene hydrogenation process using the cyclohexane method, the ammonia oximation process, two-stage rearrangement, and multi-stage purification processes. By adding certain key production equipment to the existing facilities for oximes, caprolactam, coal-based hydrogen, etc., the technical upgrades are carried out to increase the capacity to 300,000 tons per year of caprolactam ； The second phase of the project utilizes a new benzene hydrogenation process based on cyclohexene, as well as Sinopec’s latest gas-phase rearrangement technology. New production lines for cyclohexene-based processes, ammonia oximation processes, and gas-phase rearrangement for caprolactam are established, along with additional auxiliary facilities to support these operations, thereby enabling an expansion of caprolactam production capacity to 400,000 tons per year. The 18,000 Nm3/h hydrogen production unit for Zhejiang Baling Hengyi Caprolactam Co., Ltd.’s 400,000 tons/year caprolactam capacity expansion project was independently developed and designed by Huaxi Technology and East China Engineering. On July 17, 2019, a successful single-run operation was carried out, producing hydrogen of 99.95% purity that met the specifications, with CO+CO2 levels at ≤10 ppm. The plant uses vaporized LNG as raw material, and employs light hydrocarbon steam reforming for gas production along with pressure swing adsorption (PSA) purification technologies to produce industrial hydrogen. After commissioning, the unit operated smoothly, with advanced technical parameters that met the design and production requirements.