GRUBB (Chevron USA, Inc.)
I consulted our corporate experts for this, Shingou Lou and Dave Kohler. We built one in Pascagoula and their basic response was that there’s really no reason to expect any more instability problems than you would have with normal olefins. And as with the other olefins, if you let them go unchecked, they could lead to an insoluble gum residue. These can be mitigated effectively with some antioxidants—the phenylenediamine-hindered phenol. They do recommend that you inject them very close to the source unit. Like I said, Pascagoula converted an MTBE plant and we had no instability issues at our plant. Corporate-wide, we actually have experience with two ion exchange resin-type catalyst units, two solid phosphoric acids distributed on solid support-type catalyst units, and we have experience with Dimersol-type units.
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