Digital Transformation
Production levels: Are they all they could be?
by Doug White
by Doug White
Ensuring that your refinery is flexible enough to accommodate a variety of discounted crudes and adjust production to meet critical customer commitments sometimes feels like walking a tightrope with just the right balance between the financial benefit these crudes offer and the increased fouling and corrosion they cause to your assets.
Unfortunately, when your refinery takes advantage of the increasing number of discounted opportunity crudes, your assets are at risk for corrosion in unexpected places, and accelerated fouling that can impact production capability for the entire refinery. This makes it challenging to meet your production targets.
Like many refineries, your staff may lack sufficient visibility into equipment health. Without visibility and analysis on the condition of your equipment, it is impossible to accurately know the current state of your refinery. Compounding this issue, many refineries still choose route-based data collection. Unfortunately, this basic method of manual monitoring is performed infrequently and uses valuable and limited resources that should be eliminating problems rather than hunting for them. And, because this approach results in large gaps in asset health data, your refinery is at greater risk for downtime, which may result in revenue loss—not to mention an increased risk for a safety or environmental incident.
How to increase asset availability and plant utilization
Refiners rated as having Top Quartile production performance greatly benefit from lower operating costs and increased asset utilization. A first step toward reaching a higher level of performance involves gaining insight into the state of your refinery’s assets, so your operators can get the right data and analysis on performance to take corrective action before equipment failure results in a shutdown or slowdown.
This approach worked well for a large Gulf Coast refinery which made an automation upgrade for a coker and hydrocracker, resulting in a 50 percent reduction in lost availability due to unscheduled shutdowns and slowdowns. The improvement in these two units alone was worth $1-2 million per year in increased margin.
Tips for producing more yield
Accurate knowledge of refinery losses and consumed energy is another key to maximizing product yields. In fact, many refinery managers discover that through systematic review and upgraded measurement data, software, and procedures, these losses can be significantly reduced.
Of course, with technology continually becoming more complex, having a highly skilled workforce is vital. Lack of training often prevents your staff from making full use of the available technology and results in your plant running at performance levels that are below its potential. Fortunately, there are cost-effective and efficient training alternatives available that can rapidly help your staff become proficient with applying these technologies.
While Emerson’s automation and monitoring capabilities can empower refineries to maximize availability and production efficiency, to get the most out of any advanced technology it must be used correctly. Working with Emerson consultants, you’ll gain the ability to implement processes that will help your staff make the cultural shift and behavioral changes needed to take full advantage of these technologies.
