When the present operation of the urea plant should be integrated into the revamp, Stamicarbon performs a revamp study, in order to examine the present performance of the plant and to investigate the optimum solution for the revamp and integration with the original plant design. It is important to consider a debottlenecking or revamp project because it is very attractive to take full advantage of all the design margins available in order to produce more urea. This will lead to a maximum production level in a rather costly process installation. A higher production level will be achieved with the same number of people, the same infrastructure and the same buildings. The total fixed costs can be divided by more tons of urea leading to a lower cost price of urea. This is also a reason that the sizes of grass root plants are nowadays growing significantly. Revamping

It is important to consider a debottlenecking or revamp project because it is very attractive to take full advantage of all the design margins available in order to produce more urea. This will lead to a maximum production level in a rather costly process installation. A higher production level will be achieved with the same number of people, the same infrastructure and the same buildings. The total fixed costs can be divided by more tons of urea leading to a lower cost price of urea. This is also a reason that the sizes of grass root plants are nowadays growing significantly. Revamping or debottlenecking urea plants depends on the availability of feed stocks and utilities.

Because this availability of feed stocks and utilities are different at every site, Stamicarbon developed several revamping concepts. From these revamping concepts the following expectations about capacity increase are given as a ballpark figure in the following table: Concept type Expected capacity increase % More in more out 10 - 25 The double stripper 30 - 45 The MP add-on 35 - 50 The pool condenser 40 - > 100 The reference for the given capacity increase is the nameplate capacity. It should be noted that the achievable plant capacity increase depends on the original used design margins of the large capital equipment.