Question

If 50% of a barrel of sweet crude oil is converted into gasoline and the raw crude oil charge pump is pumping at 9279 gallons per minute, and the turbosine pump (which moves the gasoline fraction out of the column) is at 800 gallons per minute, with a crude column that is typically 26 ft in diameter and over 150 feet tall, and assuming a typical production day for one column is 275,000 barrels per day (bpd), what is the flow rate of crude oil into a single distillation column?

Answer 1

The flow rate of crude oil into a single distillation column, given a production of 275,000 barrels per day, is approximately 8,020 gallons per minute.

Step-by-step explanation:

To find the flow rate of crude oil into a single distillation column given that the production is 275,000 barrels per day (bpd), we need to first convert barrels per day to gallons per minute (gal/min), since we're provided with the pump rates in gallons per minute. Given that one barrel equals 42 US gallons, we can convert 275,000 barrels into gallons and then to the flow rate in gallons per minute:

275,000 bpd * 42 gallons/barrel = 11,550,000 gallons/day.

Since there are 1,440 minutes in a day (24 hours * 60 minutes), we can further break this down into minutes:

11,550,000 gallons/day / 1,440 minutes/day ≈ 8,020 gal/min.

Therefore, the flow rate of crude oil into a single distillation column is approximately 8,020 gal/min. This calculation assumes that all the crude oil processed is going into a single distillation column, which is a typical simplification for this type of problem.