Zodiac Enterprises LLC
1112 Industrial Blvd
Caldwell, TX 77836
Phone: (979) 567-6931
Fax: (979) 567-6973
Email: contact@zodcat.com
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Our Facility
The pretreatment burn off is conducted in a rotary kiln utilizing an indirect fired heater. This assures that there is no mixing of the combustion gas with the catalyst. The air flow within the kiln is minimized in order to assure that no small particles like fines or dust are entrained. The result is a tight material balance across the unit and no platinum loss. In addition to a rotary kiln calciner and state of the art weighing and sampling equipment, the new facility houses an on-site laboratory, maintenance shop, and offices for Zodiac management and contract representatives. Because the burn off oven is a rotary kiln, it’s the ideal process for burning off catalyst fines from a Continuous Catalytic Reformer (CCR).
This is a long-recognized need of its customers which Zodiac (Gemini) can now meet. Spent catalyst shipments large and small can be processed and sampled quickly and accurately. Therefore, there is no longer a need to accumulate large inventories of CCR fines before sending them for reclamation.
The current configuration of the facility which sits on a twenty-one (21) acre site has over five (5) acres of paved area for staging of delivery vehicles. Zodiac participated with the City of Caldwell and the County of Burleson in securing a grant from the Texas Capital Fund Program for increasing the natural gas supply and making the improvements to the roads that were needed to support the new facility. This project represents Phase One of Zodiac's (Gemini’s) three phase plans for this location. Future plans include establishing chemical operations similar to those which exist at Zodiac's flagship facility known as Gemini Industries Inc. in Santa Ana CA facility.
In order to efficiently recover the precious metals (platinum and rhenium) from spent reforming and isomerization catalysts, certain organic compounds which are deposited on the catalyst by the petroleum feedstocks must be removed first. In the case of reformers, this can be done with an in situ regeneration of the spent catalyst prior to the unloading from the unit. However, in the interest of saving valuable time in getting the reformer back in operation after a catalyst change, many petroleum refiners have decided to abbreviate the regeneration process. This results in a spent catalyst which needs an ex situ burn off prior to metals reclamation. From a reclamation stand point, however, this adds time to the process and delays the return of the recovered precious metals. This is important because the metals used to make the replacement catalyst are normally leased, so the quicker the metals on the spent catalyst can be recovered, the quicker the lease can be terminated. Even though precious metals lease rates are fairly low from an historical standpoint, when the high prices of platinum and rhenium are factored in, the cost of leasing metals for a catalyst change is very expensive. In fact, the metals return time has become more important than the actual direct cost of the metals recovery
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