Chemical Engineering Services in Houston, TX | Process EPCM

The largest concentration of chemical engineering on earth

Drive east out of downtown Houston on Highway 225 and you pass through something that has no real equivalent anywhere. Pasadena, Deer Park, La Porte, Baytown, Texas City and the Bayport complex form a continuous petrochemical corridor along the Ship Channel: refineries, olefins crackers, polyethylene and polypropylene units, chlor-alkali plants, terminals and the tank farms that connect them. It began in earnest during the Second World War, when the United States needed aviation fuel and synthetic rubber immediately and built the capacity to make them on the bayou in a matter of months. It has been expanding, revamping and reinventing itself ever since, and it is why more chemical engineers work within thirty miles of this office than in most countries.

The industry gave the region prosperity and a complicated reputation. Locals used to call Pasadena “Stinkadena” without much affection. The corridor has also produced some of the most consequential process safety events in the industry’s history — the Phillips complex explosion at Pasadena in 1989, the Texas City refinery disaster in 2005, the tank farm fire at Deer Park in 2019 — and each of them changed how this work is done, not only here but everywhere. The investigations were conducted in this city. The engineers who testified and the ones who rebuilt afterwards are in the professional societies our people belong to. Process safety is not an abstraction in Houston; it is family history for a large part of the workforce.

That is the context in which Tundra Engineering offers chemical and process engineering services from Houston. The technical standard here is set by an industry that has learned some of its lessons the hardest way available, and the local expectation is that a consultant will be conservative where it matters and honest about uncertainty.

Plant HAZOPs

A hazard and operability study is a structured argument conducted by people willing to be tedious in a room for several days so nobody has to be heroic in the field later. Take the process node by node, apply guide words to each parameter, ask what happens and whether the safeguards are adequate. The method is simple; the facilitation is everything. A weak chair turns a HAZOP into a design review. A chair who does not understand the process turns it into a formality. A study without operations and maintenance in the room misses the failures that actually occur at three in the morning.

Tundra facilitates HAZOPs, what-if studies, LOPA and other process hazard analyses for new designs, for modifications and for facilities that have never had one done properly. In the United States, OSHA’s Process Safety Management standard requires a PHA for covered processes and a revalidation at least every five years, and the EPA’s Risk Management Program adds its own obligations for many Gulf Coast sites. Meeting the letter is easy. Producing a study that genuinely changes the design is harder, and it depends almost entirely on who is in the room and whether the actions get closed.

We track actions to resolution rather than to a spreadsheet, and we are comfortable telling a project team that the study has found something real and the schedule will have to absorb it. A revalidation that simply re-signs the previous study is worse than none, because it creates a documented appearance of diligence.

Process reviews and capacity studies

A great deal of what leaves this office is diagnostic. An owner wants to know what a unit can really do: whether the plant rated at one number can hold another, what breaks first, and what it costs to move the constraint. Answering that honestly requires a heat and material balance that closes against real operating data, a hydraulic check across the whole system rather than the unit in question, a relief and flare load assessment under the new case, and a candid look at whether the measurement underpinning the operating data can be trusted.

Gulf Coast plants routinely operate well above their original design rate because eighty years of incremental debottlenecking has moved constraint after constraint. The consequence is that nameplate figures are often meaningless and relief systems were sized for a plant that no longer exists. Relief revalidation is one of the most common findings in a capacity study here, and one of the most important.

The commercial context is tolling and third-party processing. A midstream or terminal operator selling firm capacity needs a defensible number with the assumptions written down, because that number will end up in a contract and be quoted back years later by someone who was not in the meeting.

Hydrocarbon gas treating and conditioning

Treating and conditioning is the work of getting a gas stream to a condition where it can be moved, processed or sold: dehydration to prevent hydrates and corrosion, acid gas removal, dew point control, inert management, mercury and oxygen removal where required, and handling the liquids that drop out along the way. The choices — glycol against molecular sieve, mechanical refrigeration against Joule-Thomson, amine selection and circulation rate, stages of separation — are trade-offs between capital, operating cost, turndown and reliability, and they depend on what the gas actually is rather than on what the last project did.

The Gulf Coast adds specification pressure from downstream. Gas heading to a liquefaction train has very tight limits on carbon dioxide, water and heavy hydrocarbons because anything that freezes at cryogenic temperature will eventually stop the plant. Petrochemical feedstock buyers have their own contaminant limits. A facility built to meet a pipeline sales specification may not meet either, and the gap analysis between the two is a common piece of work for us.

Troubleshooting is the other half. A surprising proportion of treating problems turn out to be contamination, foaming, filtration or an instrument that has been reading wrong for two years. We prefer to look at samples and historian data before anyone specifies new equipment.

Gas sweetening

Sweetening — removing hydrogen sulphide and carbon dioxide, usually with an amine system — is unforgiving chemistry with severe consequences. Amine selection, circulation rate and reboiler duty set the operating cost; metallurgy, stress relief and corrosion control determine whether the unit survives; and acid gas disposal, whether by sulphur recovery, incineration or injection, determines whether the project is permittable. Texas Commission on Environmental Quality permitting, the sulphur dioxide limits that come with it, and the community around a Gulf Coast fence line all shape what is possible.

Our sweetening work covers new units, revamps, amine system troubleshooting, sulphur plant performance review and tail gas treating. Foaming, heat stable salt accumulation, filtration neglect and reboiler fouling account for most of the performance complaints we investigate, and most of them are operating and maintenance problems rather than design problems.

The city that pays for it all

Whatever people think of the industry, it built a remarkable city. The Texas Medical Center is the largest medical complex in the world and was funded substantially by energy money; Rice University sits across the street with one of the better chemical engineering programmes in the country. The Museum of Fine Arts, the Menil Collection and the Rothko Chapel exist because oil families spent their money on art. Hermann Park, the zoo and the Japanese Garden fill up every Sunday with a population that speaks well over a hundred languages.

Houston is the most diverse major metropolitan area in the United States and it wears that lightly. It is a city of long commutes, generous people, extraordinary food and almost no pretension, where the quickest way to be accepted is to be good at something useful.

Why the Houston process group

Because the licensors, the amine and catalyst suppliers, the specialist consultants and the plants themselves are all within an hour. Because our engineers have facilitated studies in the units they are assessing. And because in a region where the consequences of process error are so well documented, an outside opinion that is technically strong and commercially disinterested is worth what it costs.

If you have a unit underperforming, a PHA that is overdue for a real revalidation, a treating or sweetening system fighting you, or a capacity number you cannot defend to a counterparty, that is the work this group does.

Reports that can be acted on

A process study earns its fee when somebody can do something with it. We put the conclusion and its confidence level at the front, keep assumptions where a reviewer can attack them, and make recommendations specific enough to be estimated and scheduled. A report that requires a second study before anything can happen has failed, however thorough it is.

We also test conclusions against the worst realistic operating case rather than the design case, because that is the condition your operators will actually meet on the hottest week of August with one exchanger fouled and a control valve near its limit. Houston plants run hard, and a study built on ideal conditions will not survive the first upset.