The Teesside oil terminal is a major

crude oil Petroleum, also known as crude oil or simply oil, is a naturally occurring, yellowish-black liquid chemical mixture found in geological formations, consisting mainly of hydrocarbons. The term ''petroleum'' refers both to naturally occurring u ...

reception, processing, storage and export facility at Seal Sands,

Middlesbrough Middlesbrough ( ), colloquially known as Boro, is a port town in the Borough of Middlesbrough, North Yorkshire, England. Lying to the south of the River Tees, Middlesbrough forms part of the Teesside Built up area, built-up area and the Tees Va ...

. It receives and processes crude oil delivered by the subsea NORPIPE pipeline from the Norwegian Ekofisk field and the UK Fulmar and J-Block fields. The terminal includes facilities for exporting stabilised crude oil and

liquefied petroleum gas Liquefied petroleum gas, also referred to as liquid petroleum gas (LPG or LP gas), is a fuel gas which contains a flammable mixture of hydrocarbon gases, specifically propane, Butane, ''n''-butane and isobutane. It can also contain some ...

es (LPG) by tanker and pipeline.

History

The

Ekofisk field Ekofisk is an oil field in block 2/4 of the Norway, Norwegian sector of the North Sea about southwest of Stavanger. Discovered in 1969 by Phillips Petroleum Company, it remains one of the most important oil fields in the North Sea. This was th ...

was commissioned in 1970 with gas from the field exported to Emden Germany and oil loaded into tankers offshore. In 1975 the 354-km Norpipe subsea pipeline was commissioned to transport oil from Ekofisk to Seal Sands Teesside UK. The Teesside oil terminal (54°37'05"N 1°10'37"W) was designed to treat this oil to a specification suitable for atmospheric storage and tanker transportation. It was also designed to process the associated

natural gas liquids Natural-gas condensate, also called natural gas liquids, is a low-density mixture of hydrocarbon liquids that are present as gaseous components in the raw natural gas produced from many natural gas fields. Some gas species within the raw natura ...

(NGL). A connection to Norpipe in the UK sector of the North Sea allowed UK fields to export oil to Teesside as they were commissioned. These included the

Fulmar The fulmars are tube-nosed seabirds in the family Procellariidae. The family includes two extant species, and two extinct fossil species from the Miocene. Fulmars superficially resemble gulls, but are readily distinguished by their flight on s ...

installation commissioned in 1982, and the Judy installation, commissioned in 1997. The 285-acre (115 ha) Teesside site was selected for the deep water moorings available. The oil terminal was officially opened on 21 October 1975. Three days later the first tanker departed Teesside with a cargo of stabilised Ekofisk oil treated at the Teesside terminal. Initially the plant was unable to process natural gas liquids. The NGL plant was commissioned in March 1979. The terminal also provided feedstock to the nearby Shell UK Ltd Teessport Refinery.

The plant

The plant at the Teesside terminal includes the following: * ''Crude oil reception and storage facilities'' – including pig receiver, isolation valves and 4 oil storage spheres * ''Six parallel oil stabilisation trains'' – comprising crude washing, heating, degassing, cooling and pumping * ''Natural gas liquids (NGL) processing plant'' – this fractionates NGL into purified gas and liquid products, the plant includes distillation, compression and storage facilities * ''Product export plant'' – including pumping, metering, export pipelines, jetties and tanker loading plant * ''Vapour recovery facilities'' – including

volatile organic compound Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are organic compounds that have a high vapor pressure at room temperature. They are common and exist in a variety of settings and products, not limited to Indoor mold, house mold, Upholstery, upholstered furnitur ...

s (VOC) carbon bed absorption * ''Effluent treatment'' – including

ballast water Ballast is weight placed low in ships to lower their centre of gravity, which increases stability (more technically, to provide a righting moment (physics), moment to resist any Heeling (sailing), heeling moment on the Hull (watercraft), hull). I ...

and plant effluent, treatment includes plate separators and

dissolved air flotation Dissolved air flotation (DAF) is a water treatment process that clarifies wastewaters (or other waters) by the removal of suspended matter such as oil or solids. The removal is achieved by dissolving air in the water or wastewater under pressure an ...

. Effluent is sent to the Bran Sands sewage treatment works for final biological treatment * ''Utilities'' – including power generation, steam raising, firewater, instrument air and inert gas * ''Flare system'' – for disposal of unwanted gases

Operations

The specification of oil arriving at Teesside from the Norpipe pipeline is typically: The Teesside terminal was originally designed to process 1 million barrels/day of live crude oil. It currently (2020) receives 800,000 barrels/day (127,186 m³/d) of oil and processes up to 67,000 barrels/day (10,652 m³/d) of NGL. The specification of the plant is to produce stabilised crude with a Reid vapour pressure of 3 to 8 psig (20.7 – 55 kPa).

Stabilisation

There are six parallel stabilizer columns, the heat to drive the separation process is by

reboiler Reboilers are heat exchangers typically used to provide heat to the bottom of industrial distillation columns. They boil the liquid from the bottom of a distillation column to generate vapors which are returned to the column to drive the distillat ...

s at the base of each column. Each reboiler has a thermal capacity of 40 MW. In the base of the stabilisers the temperature is sufficient to drive off lighter hydrocarbons as vapour. These rise through the column, stripping lights ends out of the down-coming oil. The light ends are withdrawn from the top of the stabilisers where they are compressed and routed to the NGL plant. Stabilized crude is drawn off the base of the stabilisers and is cooled and routed to storage tanks. There are 9 stabilised oil tanks each with a capacity 750,000 barrels (119,237 m³).

NGL processing

The gases from the top section of the stabilisers are routed to the NGL plant. The plant also receives (since 1998) NGL recovered in the adjacent CATS gas terminal. The plant is capable of processing 64,000 barrels/day (10,175 m³/d). It comprises a series of fractionation vessels: de-methaniser, de-ethaniser, de-propaniser, de-butaniser and butane splitter. The vessels operate at successively lower pressures and higher temperatures. The vapour from the top of each vessel is respectively methane, ethane, propane, butane and iso-butane. Propane is used as a refrigeration medium in the plant. There are three propane compressors each driven by a 3.1 MW

gas turbine A gas turbine or gas turbine engine is a type of Internal combustion engine#Continuous combustion, continuous flow internal combustion engine. The main parts common to all gas turbine engines form the power-producing part (known as the gas gene ...

. The flue gases from the gas turbines are routed to the combustion chambers of the steam boilers. There are three steam boilers of 104 MW capacity which provide steam for the stabiliser plant reboilers. Methane is used as fuel gas on the plant. Ethane, propane and butane are liquefied and sent to insulated storage tanks prior to loading onto ships.

Export

When required oil is pumped from the tanks to the quays and loaded aboard tankers. The terminal has four quays for crude oil export. One of these quays can be used for NGL products. There are also four quays for

es (LPG) loading. The crude oil quays are each capable of handling tankers of up to 150,000 deadweight tonnes, the LPG quays can handle carriers of up to 60,000 m³. Each of the jetties is provided with a vapour collection and recovery system. There are two vapour recovery units capable of processing 16,000 m³/h of hydrocarbon rich vapour, comprising vacuum pumps, guard beds and absorber columns. In addition to sea transport stabilised crude can also exported by pipeline to the Greatham tank farm.

Owners

The Teesside oil terminal was owned and operated by

Phillips Petroleum Company Phillips Petroleum Company was an American oil company incorporated in 1917 that expanded into petroleum refining, marketing and transportation, natural gas gathering and the chemicals sectors. It was Phillips Petroleum that first found oil in th ...

from 1975 to 2002. Ownership transferred to

ConocoPhillips ConocoPhillips Company is an American multinational corporation engaged in hydrocarbon exploration and production. It is based in the Energy Corridor district of Houston, Texas. The company has operations in 15 countries and has production in t ...

when Phillips and Conoco Inc. merged in 2002. By 2018 the terminal was still operated by ConocoPhillips. It was owned by: * ConocoPhillips Petroleum Company U.K. Ltd. 40.25% * Total Holdings Europe S.A.S 45.22% * ENI S.p.A. 14.20% * Minority shareholder 0.33%

References

{{reflist Petroleum infrastructure in the United Kingdom Petroleum industry in the United Kingdom Oil terminals