Managing Terminal and Offsites Operations

by Jim Cahill

I've written about terminal and offsites operations a few times in the past. I had a chance to catch a presentation given by Emerson's Shoyeb Hasanali, who leads the terminal management solutions team.

Shoyeb began by giving us a good grounding on terminal operations. These facilities provide receiving, shipping and storage facilities for liquid or gaseous products processed by or produced in a refinery or petrochemical complex. These sites typically include tank farms, blenders and loading and unloading facilities. The loading and unloading facilities may handle truck, rail, marine or pipeline transport of these liquid and gaseous products.

Some of the issues terminal operators currently face is a lack of spare capacity to handle additional bulk products, increasing safety, environmental and regulatory compliance requirements, and an increasing number of product variations.

The rapid price increase in refined products has caused a shift in the movement patterns and logistics in the transportation of these products. The automation and information systems within existing terminals were not designed for the current economic climate and rapid changes in spot prices. Terminal operators often have disparate automation systems for custody transfer, loading/unloading, blending, vapor recovery and other units.

Shoyeb and his team of terminal management solution consultants work with terminal operators to provide front end engineering design (FEED) to identify the opportunities to improve the flow of accurate and timely information required in rapidly-changing price world.

The FEED study is typically followed by functional designs, functional requirements and factory acceptance testing for the hardware and software used in the solution. Much of the technologies for these solutions come from various businesses within Emerson Process Management. These include Saab Rosemount tank gauging, Daniel custody transfer, metering skids, loading rack presets, Micro Motion flow and density measurement, METCO metering services and DeltaV blend control.

The team has delivered projects all over the world on products including gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, asphalt, fuel oil, lube oils, chemicals, fertilizers, liquefied petroleum gas, liquefied natural gas and specialty chemical products.

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April 8, 2008 in Blending, in Chemical, in Refining, in Terminal | Comments (0)

Planning and Executing More Efficient Terminals

by Jim Cahill

In the process of moving hydrocarbon through the supply chain from producer to consumer, terminals play an important role. They receive liquids and gases from many sources including ship, rail and pipeline. These gas and liquid hydrocarbons are stored in tanks or vessels until required to move via other methods of transportation including barge, truck and pipeline.

I had the chance to view an upcoming article featuring Emerson's Cor Vermeijs. He's based in the Netherlands. The article explored ways for terminal operators to use automation to optimize the inventory management and operational efficiency of their terminals. The goal is to improve the quality, productivity and availability of the terminal and help the owner of the terminal lower the costs of operations and maintenance, improve environmental and safety compliance, and reduce energy usage.

He notes that many terminals today are manually operated from planning all the way to manually operated valves and pumps. This limits the availability of real-time information to make the most efficient schedules. These delays affect the throughput of the terminal, which directly affects its profitability.

In the article, Cor stresses the starting point should be to study the current operational processes. The key is to look for areas of inefficiency that can be automated. The study typically includes a cross-section of the organization from operations, sales and management. The output of this study is:

…a plan to optimize these processes, to automate them, and to implement them wherever necessary. The results of this site audit are issued in a report that gives the solution for the concept, a cost-benefit analysis, the payback period and a performance guarantee. It's all based on the best possible use of the storage tanks, the pumps, the pipelines and the jetties. The objective is as many product movements as possible without running the risk of product contamination or tank overfills.

Architecturally, when manual processes are automated, the information is collected in a single system. This information becomes the basis for a route planner. The system takes the recommended route with the corresponding pipeline segments, valves and pumps and links it to the data from the work order. This information can include the time when the route/transfer can be started, how long it will take, which ship or train will deliver the volume, and who is the owner. Cor sums this up:

…all information is available not only to the operator in the control room, but also to the man on the jetty, the planner and perhaps even to the captain of the unloading or receiving vessel. And it all takes place in real time, with immediate feedback of events such as a delay along the line, so that you can adjust your planning while the work goes on without interruption, thus increasing your terminal's efficiency.

Terminal management includes a number of processes including custody transfer accounting, inventory tracking, security management, loader or driver verification, load requests and initiation, permissives management, ticket generation, custom reports, remote dock monitoring, event logging, and system integrity management.

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December 3, 2007 in Data Management, in Project Services, in Terminal | Comments (0)

Assessing Safety Risks in Terminal Operations

by Jim Cahill

Safety risk assessments require a methodical look at all the areas of a manufacturing process where hazardous conditions may exist. I caught up with certified functional safety expert (CFSE), Mike Schmidt, who recently worked with a terminal operator to relook at the safety risks at the terminal. Mike is a consultant in Emerson's Refining and Chemical industry center.

Mike worked with the risk assessment team which included members from HSE (health, safety and environmental), engineering, operations, and the terminal manager.

The team looked at the layers of protection in place as well as the current safety instrumented functions (SIF) that were currently in place to reduce the risks of various hazards. For a terminal which takes in and sends refined hydrocarbon products like gasoline and diesel these possible hazards include things like ruptured pipelines, loss of pipeline containment, storage tank overfill, tank truck overfill, and barge overfill to name some.

Following the total safety lifecycle as prescribed by the global IEC 61511 safety standard (ISA S84.01 2004 in the U.S.), the team very methodically considered every risk, its likelihood, and the consequence of the hazard occurring. Areas were identified to add to the existing layers of protection and safety instrumented functions.

An example Mike shared was the hazardous condition caused by a storage tank overfill condition. These tanks are filled either by an incoming pipeline or from a marine vessel. The team determined that the likely cause of a storage tank overfill with the worst consequences is an error or failure condition during receipt of product from a pipeline, because a pipeline represents an essentially infinite source of spilled material. To mitigate this risk, redundant level sensors are placed on each tank. The operating level is monitored and controlled with a separate level transmitter. Should a possible overfill condition begin to occur the safety instrumented system initiates closure on the pipeline isolation valve. Given the consequences and impact of this potential hazard, this safety instrumented function was rated SIL 2.

Out of this assessment, the next step was to develop a detailed safety requirements specification, again consistent with the IEC 61511 standard.

The performance-based standards outlined in the IEC 61511 standard more and more require this close working relationship between the process manufacturer and safety instrumented system provider to carefully examine the hazards and develop and execute a plan to mitigate the risks identified.

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January 18, 2007 in Terminal | Comments (2) | Trackback (0)