Petroleum Co. of Trinidad & Tobago Ltd. (Petrotrin) has contracted with GE to design, construct, operate and maintain a temporary water treatment plant utilizing GE’s advanced ultrafiltration and MobileRO reverse osmosis technology. It will supply the refinery with 3.5 million imperial gallons of water per day of filtered water.

Petrotrin has undertaken a clean fuels program that involves the addition of new plants and an upgrade of the existing fluid catalytic cracking unit. As a result of these changes within the refinery, the refinery steam and cooling water demand will increase to sustain these process units. Therefore, the water demand will increase in tandem.

The mobile water treatment plant will be located within Petrotrin’s refinery at Pointe-a-Pierre, Trinidad and Tobago, West Indies. The new mobile water treatment plant will provide reverse osmosis (RO) process water to meet the higher demand for filtered water that will be used for industrial processes inside the refinery. GE’s technology offers the added benefit of a small footprint with high operating efficiency.

Specifically, the new facility will include five of GE’s M-Pak mobile ultrafiltration (UF) units, four 600-gal/min MobileRO units, three circular tanks, RO feed pumps, transfer pumps, waste pumps, RO cleaning skid, air compressor for instruments and an office trailer with storage and laboratory. GE Power & Water, Schenectady, N.Y., will design, construct, install, own, operate and maintain the facility for two years.

GE’s water business currently provides chemicals and technical monitoring services at the refinery for key unit operations such as the crude units and boilers.