The most chemically demanding cooling water environment in industrial water treatment — high heat loads, complex metallurgy, large circulating volumes, and program costs that routinely exceed $1M per year.
Refinery cooling water systems must handle highly variable heat loads from process units — crude units, FCC units, hydroprocessing — where fouling on the water side of a heat exchanger directly reduces unit throughput. Scale and biofouling deposits as thin as 0.1mm can reduce heat transfer efficiency by 10–20%.
Refinery cooling systems contain a mix of carbon steel, copper alloys, stainless steel, and occasionally titanium or nickel alloys across different service units. Each alloy has different corrosion sensitivities, and a single inhibitor program must address all of them simultaneously — requiring speciation-level chemistry modeling to ensure adequate protection across the system.
Hydrocarbon leaks from process side into the cooling water create significant treatment challenges: increased oxygen demand, accelerated biological growth, foam, and deposits that mask corrosion. Early detection through routine monitoring — ATP, hydrocarbon analysis, conductivity trending — is more valuable than reactive treatment.
A refinery cooling water program typically spends $500K–$3M annually on chemicals and services. The incumbent vendor has a direct commercial interest in maintaining — and growing — that spend. Independent oversight of program performance and vendor contract compliance is structurally necessary, not optional.
A vendor-neutral assessment of your refinery cooling program — corrosion and scale risk model, CoC optimization analysis, vendor contract review, and quantified savings estimate. From $18,000 per site.
Learn more →PHREEQC-based speciation model calibrated to your refinery's actual makeup water chemistry and process unit heat load profile. Optimize CoC, blowdown, and dosing strategy for each unit. From $60,000.
Learn more →Write the performance specifications your treatment vendor can't game, build the evaluation framework, and govern the contract with KPIs that actually measure what matters. From $25,000.
Learn more →Finding your refinery's true CoC ceiling — and safely reaching it.
ChemistryWhy the Langelier Index is insufficient for refinery cooling water chemistry.
ChemistryMoving from volume-based to outcome-based chemistry management.
Start with a 30-minute discovery call — no pitch, just an honest conversation about your program.