What began as a complex problem for a customer has led to the development of an industry leading burner solution for flaring applications. A California based oil and gas company was facing several problems when they first approached ClearSign. They needed a solution for disposing of wellhead trapped gases with a mid-high heating value gas (~1600 Btu/SCF) that met the nation’s most stringent flaring emissions. Additionally, they needed this flaring application to serve multiple gas streams. The customer had previously worked with other companies who offer flare systems, none were able to solve all the issues facing the customer.
ClearSign was contacted, based upon their history of offering industry leading NOx levels. ClearSign turned to their state of the art process burner and began to design a burner system that could retrofit the customer’s current enclosed combustor. ClearSign began by introducing a different porous ceramic surface than what had been traditionally used in the process burner in order to provide a product that could handle the elevated temperatures on an enclosed combustor that had no heat transfer to a process fluid. The new flare system was installed on site and following commissioning, results were reported that met or exceeded the standards set in ClearSign’s test facility. As a result, ClearSign was able to achieve extremely low emissions, <4ppm NOx, <2ppm CO, and exceed industry destruction efficiency levels with 99.99+% DRE. This result was achieved where solutions to the flaring industries’ most common problems, no flames out of the stack, even during process upset situations were still met and, as an added bonus, the system operated at unprecedented reduced noise levels.
Within a year’s time ClearSign was contacted again by the same customer who was experiencing similar issues with other incinerators of various capacities on a separate site. ClearSign again turned to their experiences within other industries for a scalable solution and developed the modularized technology that is available today.
ClearSign added to the modularization of the technology by simplifying the process operation. By eliminating the warm up operating stage, they were able to reduce the number fuel gas connections to two, pilot and waste gas, and enhance the turndown ratio. With this new modular design, ClearSign is able to offer a scalable solution from 5 to 90 MMBTU/hr.
Our new modular design not only enhances turndown ratio and simplifies operation, but has less custom components than other previous designs and are interchangeable across flare system capacities. Finally, ClearSign’s modular pod design is adaptable across many different waste gas blends.
ClearSign’s 2nd generation ClearSign Core™ Pod is the industry’s leader in NOx, CO and DRE and is an easy retrofit for the underperforming enclosed combustor, thermal oxidizer or incinerator on your site.