Petrochemical Engineering Services in Houston, TX | Facilities EPCM

The East End, and the unglamorous end of the oil business

Navigation Boulevard runs east out of downtown Houston through the Second Ward toward the turning basin, past body shops, tortilla factories, warehouses and the place where, in 1973, a woman named Ninfa Laurenzo started selling grilled skirt steak in flour tortillas out of a small restaurant attached to her tortilla business. She called them tacos al carbón; the rest of the country came to know them as fajitas, and the original Ninfa’s on Navigation is still there, a few blocks from tank farms and pipe yards. That stretch of road is a fair summary of Houston: an immigrant neighbourhood, heavy industry and world-changing food, all sharing a street with no zoning code to keep them apart.

It is also the right neighbourhood to think about oil treating from, because this is where the crude ends up. Every barrel gathered in the Permian, the Eagle Ford or the Gulf passes through a series of increasingly boring facilities on its way to a refinery or an export dock, and the least photogenic of them — the battery, the tank farm, the treater — is where the barrel actually becomes a product with a price. If the oil does not meet specification on basic sediment and water, nothing that happened upstream matters.

Houston has been doing this for well over a century, since the Ship Channel was dredged and the refineries came to the bayou after Spindletop. The knowledge is deep and largely undocumented, held by operators and engineers who have watched emulsions behave badly in a hundred different fields. Tundra Engineering’s job in that environment is to bring method to it: measurement, sampling, modelling and design that turn craft knowledge into something repeatable.

Oil batteries and oil treating

An oil battery takes raw well effluent — crude, water, gas, sand, emulsion and whatever else the reservoir supplies — and separates it into saleable oil, a gas stream that is conserved or flared, and produced water for disposal or reinjection. The equipment list is short: inlet separation, free water knockout, heater treaters or electrostatic treaters, chemical injection, tankage with appropriate vapour handling, LACT units and proving, truck-in and truck-out facilities, produced water handling and vapour recovery. The process is anything but simple.

Our work covers new facilities, expansions, consolidations and the troubleshooting of batteries that have stopped performing. Emulsion is the most common complaint and rarely has a single cause: rising water cut, a new well with different fluid chemistry, a demulsifier that no longer matches the blend, residence time lost to accumulated solids, a treater running cool to save fuel, or incompatible chemicals injected upstream by three different vendors who have never spoken to each other. Diagnosing it takes field sampling and bottle testing, not a catalogue.

Solids matter more than most designs allow for. Many Texas completions produce enough sand and proppant flowback to change vessel residence time within a year or two of start-up, and a battery correctly sized on paper will underperform if nobody has planned for what is sitting in the bottom of the knockout. Designing for cleanout access is worth more than an extra metre of vessel diameter.

Consolidation is the recurring commercial theme. Fields develop one facility at a time, and as production declines the economics of operating a dozen small batteries collapse. A consolidation study — which sites can be combined, what the gathering hydraulics permit, what happens to trucking and emissions afterwards, and what the closure cost of the retired sites will be — is often the highest-return engineering a mature-asset operator can buy.

Tanks, vapour and the things regulators actually look at

Storage tanks are the quiet problem at every battery. Flashing, working and breathing losses from tanks holding live crude can be substantial, and they show up in emissions inventories, in TCEQ permit conditions and increasingly in aerial and satellite monitoring that nobody controls. Vapour recovery units, correctly sized and genuinely maintained, convert a reported emission into a sold volume with a real payback. We size and specify them, and we ask the harder question of whether the site can keep one running, because a VRU that trips fortnightly and gets bypassed is worse than none at all.

Thief hatches, pressure relief settings, tank blanketing and level control interact with vapour recovery in ways that are routinely misunderstood, and a large share of measured tank emissions trace back to a hatch that does not seat rather than to anything in the process design.

Truck traffic is the other externality. A battery with a heavy truck-in schedule generates dust, road damage and complaints from a county long before it generates a compliance problem, and in the fast-developing corridors around Houston those complaints increasingly come from subdivisions that were pasture when the facility was built. The engineering answer is usually a pipeline connection rather than a public meeting.

Measurement, custody transfer and getting paid

Everything at a battery eventually reduces to measurement. LACT unit design, meter proving, sampling systems, water content determination and allocation between working interest owners determine who gets paid what, and disputes here are expensive and slow. We design and audit measurement systems to API standards, reconcile volumes, and produce documentation that will survive an audit or a change of ownership — which in this market is close to inevitable.

Texas Railroad Commission requirements govern the upstream side, TCEQ the air and waste side, and the terminal or pipeline tariff sets the specification the oil has to meet. Designing to the tightest of the three from the outset is cheaper than discovering the gap during commissioning.

Weather, and the facilities that have to sit through it

Gulf Coast batteries are designed for heat, humidity and hurricanes. High ambient temperature affects treater duty and vapour generation; salt air attacks tank exteriors, walkways and instrumentation; and storm surge and rainfall drive containment, elevation and drainage design. Anchoring tanks against flotation is not a theoretical requirement here — Harvey floated tanks in 2017 and the resulting releases were entirely preventable with better siting and hold-down design.

The freeze case is the newer one. February 2021 showed that Texas facilities need freeze protection on instrument lines, chemical injection systems, water lines and small-bore piping, and that the plants which stayed running were the ones that had spent modest amounts on heat trace and insulation years earlier.

Why the Houston office

Because the fabricators who build treaters and separators, the chemical suppliers who will run your bottle tests, the measurement specialists and the terminal operators who set your specification are all within an hour’s drive. Because our engineers can be at a battery, pull samples, talk to the operator who knows what actually changed, and be back at a desk the same day.

And because Houston is a city with an unusually direct working culture. It is the most diverse large city in the United States, built by people who arrived with nothing in particular and were judged on what they could do. Nobody here is impressed by a thick report. They are impressed by clean oil, a measurement record that reconciles, and an engineer who calls back.

If your battery is not making specification, your emulsion is getting worse, your tank vapours are showing up in an emissions inventory, or you are operating more facilities than the field can now justify, that is exactly the work this group does.

Start with the field, not the capital request

Battery problems are rarely solved by new equipment. A treater running cooler than design, a demulsifier never re-tested after the water cut changed, a vapour recovery unit bypassed for a year, a meter that has drifted, or solids nobody has removed since commissioning are individually unremarkable and collectively worth more than most projects on the capital list.

So we look at those first. A field walk, a set of samples, a week with the historian and a review of the last few years of volumetric reconciliation will normally find more value than a concept study, at a fraction of the cost. Only once the easy money is gone do we start discussing vessels.

Houston is the right base for that work. The chemical suppliers who will run your bottle tests, the measurement specialists, the fabricators who build treaters and separators, and the terminals that set your specification are all within an hour’s drive, and the fields feeding this market are a short flight away. The result is a short loop between noticing a problem and doing something about it, which is ultimately what an operator is paying an engineering firm to provide.