Here is another small industry with many cars. It is a natural gas fractionation plant. The main plant and some of the storage tanks appears to fit into about a 900 foot by 450 foot area with more storage tanks and the loading racks extending beyond this area. However, there are about 40 cars at the loading racks, meaning it probably would not be much of a stretch to make the loading racks and plant smaller to fit into a smaller area on a layout.
Live Maps Bird's Eye View
Satellite photograph
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Small Industry, Many Hoppers
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"No soup for you!" - Yev Kassem (from Seinfeld)
Here is another view that shows all of the plant and loading racks.
I'm no expert on NGL plants (although I have been involved in some) but I'll offer my thoughts on modeling them. A gas separation plant is certainly an interesting idea for an industry. While they don't require anything in the way of loads in, they can create a lot of tank car loads of product out.
Gas plants, like any kind of refinery or chemical plant, are incredibly complicated animals. You normally picture the main towers and drums, and maybe the main piping, but in reality there are hundreds of pieces of equipment, thousands of feet of piping, instruments, electrical, etc. About all any modeler can reasonably expect to do is create the illusion or idea of an operating plant. Fortunately you're not likely to get many process engineers viewing and critiquing the layout.
The size of the plant itself (if we exclude ancillary units that may be necessary for utilities, purification, or post processing) doesn't really vary too much with capacity. That's because while the size of the equipment and piping may be smaller, you still generally need all the same pieces. A distillation tower for xxxx scfd (standard cubic feet / day) production may be 9' in diameter and 200' tall. The same tower for a throughput of 1/4 that volume may be 7' diameter and 100' tall. But by the time you add in the almost standard clearances between equipment, standard piperack widths, etc, the end result is that a much smaller capacity plant may be only slightly smaller in area.
I think the best approach on a plant like this, as for any refinery or chemical plant, is to concentrate on the important aspects from the railroading point of view. In this case that's the loading rack (how many cars do you want to be able to handle), the storage facilities (in the case of NGL we're talking bullets and/or spheres) and a piperack between the storage and the process unit. Rather than trying to shrink the main process unit, I suggest that the main process unit itself can better just be simulated by a photo/painting on a backdrop, or a combination of backdrop along with a few select pieces of equipment (towers/tanks, etc) in front of the backdrop.
In the end a lot comes down to artistic license. Trying to recreate an accurate model of a plant, even a small one, is likely to be a frustrating and time consuming job (not that it can't be done). I think it's better to spend time modeling the back end, and just do enough of a plant to give the idea that there's something there that can generate the product that we're interested in.
Best regards
Ed
Thanks, Ed.
I was looking at the aerial photographs and had a few ideas to make the plant smaller.
First, I noticed that there is a lot of empty space in the plant, perhaps for safety reasons. While it probably would not be prototypical for a plant outside of a city, with probably cheap land, to be compacted into a small space, I suppose for a model that much of that space could be eliminated.
Also, while reducing the capacity may not the size of the process area much, one could significantly reduce the sizes of the storage and loading areas (there are 42 cars at the racks in the link in my second post).
A third idea would be to eliminate the bullet tanks and use only spherical tanks for gas storage and use tanks that are taller than they are wide for liquids storage. Also, perhaps one could use higher dikes to make the diked areas around the tanks smaller.
From a non-process engineer's point of view, I think that the process area could be represented using a Walthers (currently out of production) and/or Plastruct refinery or two. I think that the Plastruct refinery would definitely require two kits. What do you think? Of course one would need to include a compressor building and a administration & maintenance building.
I perfer to include the plant. However, if one does not care about including the plant, one could model the loading racks of Inergy's plant west of Bakersfield, CA. The plant is 7 miles from the loading racks.
http://www.inergypropane.com/midstream_WC/index.asp
Here is a satellite photograph, no Bird's Eye views are available for that area.
Another possibility is underground storage of LPG.
Bird's Eye View
I was looking at the aerial photographs and had a few ideas to make the plant smaller. First, I noticed that there is a lot of empty space in the plant, perhaps for safety reasons. While it probably would not be prototypical for a plant outside of a city, with probably cheap land, to be compacted into a small space, I suppose for a model that much of that space could be eliminated.
A third idea would be to eliminate the bullet tanks and use only spherical tanks for gas storage.
... and use tanks that are taller than they are wide for liquids storage
Also, perhaps one could use higher dikes to make the diked areas around the tanks smaller.
I prefer to include the plant. ... From a non-process engineer's point of view, I think that the process area could be represented using a Walthers (currently out of production) and/or Plastruct refinery or two. I think that the Plastruct refinery would definitely require two kits. What do you think? Of course one would need to include a compressor building and a administration & maintenance building.
Regards
I noticed that some NGL plants produce natural gasoline. From looking at various MSDS, I noticed that the composition can vary from a large percent of butane to a large percent of larger hydrocarbons. Do any know if NGL plants produce natural gasoline with a high percent of larger molecules? If so, would they use atmospheric tanks for its storage?
The idea behind using only spherical storage tanks for gases is to model a higher capacity plant in a smaller space. I have looked at other photographs of spherical storage tanks and noticed some did not have dikes. I wonder why that plants does have them.