Since its inception in 1985, Enerquip has been designing and fabricating shell and tube heat exchangers and condensers for production plants and supplying equipment for the pharmaceutical, food and dairy, refining, and chemical industries, among many others.
With its June 2021 purchase of American Heating Company, Enerquip now similarly produces thermal fluid heaters, tank heating coils, waste heat economizers, and other industrial heating equipment for the tank terminal, biofuel, and asphalt industries.
Like the ethanol wave over a decade ago, green initiatives continue to sweep across every industry, including oil refining. Over the last several years, as more and more states began to "go green" by incentivizing eco-friendly action, Enerquip saw an increased demand for its corrosion-resistant stainless steel equipment. Many companies across the refining industry build with carbon steel, which can corrode when exposed to the trace acids and nitrates found in biofuel. As sustainability efforts increase, renewable fuels take a more significant bite out of the refining market. Savvy refiners are investing in biofuel production and blending rather than opposing it. Customers that may have chosen carbon steel heat exchangers or tank coils in the past for refining operations are now choosing 316L stainless steel or even higher alloys for biofuel blending.
In addition to biofuel blending, Enerquip is also seeing growth in other emerging sustainable fuels such as biodiesels and landfill gases.
For readers not entirely versed in biofuel blends, biofuel can be blended and used in various concentrations to make them similar to petroleum (but not identical). The most common of these concentrations are B5 blends, which are up to 5 percent biodiesel, and B20, which range from 6 to 20 percent biodiesel. B100 - pure biodiesel - is typically used as a blendstock to produce lower blends and is rarely used as a transportation fuel.
The distillation process involves using thermal fluid heaters and high-temperature reactions to yield the highest quality biodiesel. The biodiesel produced through distillation is almost transparent and easily blended, making it preferred by most users.
As mentioned above, biofuels are just the start. Enerquip has worked with customers to take landfill gas, heat it up to clean it, cool it to condense the water, and turn it into pipeline gas. Enerquip's heat exchangers were also used in a project that burned poultry litter to create steam to turn turbines and generate electricity, which then powered neighboring farms. Excess heat from this project dried tobacco leaves at an adjacent plant.
Beyond its efforts to maintain an eco-friendly reputation, Enerquip further prides itself on its track records in reliability and quality. Industrial heating is a meticulous and precise process; products cannot just be heated without a direct objective. In the heating process for biofuels, a certain temperature can be reached at which the product quickly begins to degrade. Strict measures must be taken to ensure the sanctity of the product; equipment must not be oversized, the temperature must be accurately regulated, and the entire process broadly requires specific measurement. This is Enerquip's area of expertise: precise production to ensure the highest possible quality, with the added bonus of ecological harm reduction.
In this age of ubiquitous environmental consciousness across all facets of society, consumers can take solace in the fact that sustainability initiatives in industry continue around the globe, appearing in such forms as altering production processes and turning to alternative fuels. As many states begin to mandate the employment of biofuel blending to certain capacities, it can be said with confidence that not only is the blending process not going anywhere any time soon, but the industry-wide mantra of going green is also here to stay.
For more information, visit enerquip.com.