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.

Technorati Tags: | | | | | | | |

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

Preparing for Turnarounds from an Instrument, Valve, Electrical Reliability and Process Optimization Standpoint

by Jim Cahill

I've highlighted the topic of plant turnarounds (planned downtime for maintenance) a few times in the past. Back from the Emerson Exchange, here's my take on the Smart Turnaround workshop. For continuous processes that run for years, this turnaround provides opportunity to update, fix, repair, and replace a host of plant assets including instruments, valves, electrical distribution equipment, connectors and cabling, and the overall performance of the process.

The Emerson presenters looked at the advanced planning that can be done from these various perspectives. From these diverse areas of expertise, diagnostic testing helps develop a turnaround plan that prioritizes critical asset work, defines the scope of work, develops the schedule for the work, and identifies the parts and people required to best get this difficult work done.

Chris Forland an operations consultant whose work I've highlighted in earlier posts kicked off the session discussing some of the challenges of the turnaround process. A big one is finding problems you didn't expect while in the turnaround. These unexpected problems cause extra charges and delays. Chris discussed ways that Emerson turnaround specialists can help with the detailed planning to make sure the work is efficiently performed during the turnaround. He noted that less time to plan mean less flexibility as the turnaround date approaches. Other challenges included maintaining compliance with safety and regulatory compliance, working with budget constraints, reducing process variability, losing experienced personnel due to infrequency of turnarounds, and pressuring of short turnarounds due to sold out condition of produced product.

Scott Grunwald, a turnaround business manager in the Instrument & Valve Services business, recommended that with the valves and instruments, you start by building the plan based on the benefits to be achieved the roles of all participants in the maintenance activities, and the prioritized list of activities and anticipated timelines. The process starts with a walk down of the facility. Next, FlowScanner is used to measure internal valve conditions to identify problems to address during the turnaround. When it's time for executing the turnaround, only valves needing significant work are removed. Other valves are repaired in place.

The team often brings an on-sight mobile trailer that is a self-contained workshop to rework the instrument and valves right on-site. This helps to expedite the repair process.

Looking at turnarounds from an electrical reliability perspective, Steve Metzger described the goal--to prioritize and focus the resources by pre-diagnosing troubleshooting, followed by the planning of the repair services and parts required to get the lead times properly. The key is to do as much pre-work as possible, fix what's possible, and remove it from the scope of the turnaround to lessen the pile of work to be done.

On-line partial discharge testing before the turnaround detects cables with degrading insulation that could cause short circuits and unexpected downtime. This testing helps determine which cables are OK and which need to be replaced during the turnaround.

James Beall, also highlighted in earlier posts, summed up the goal of a Smart Turnaround--to identify the items you can fix in advance, and prioritize what can't be in the turnaround plan. James and the variability management consultants look at the control performance and opportunities to reduce process variability through better tuning. James gave an example of a mixing temperature control loop where the deadtime was nine minutes between a change in setpoint and response the temperature was changing. The problem was not in the loop tuning but rather in the lag caused by the temperature transmitter being located 250 feet from where it should have been. Finding this early in the process allowed this installation mistake to be scheduled and fixed during the turnaround.

Chris closed this presentation with how you can look at the return on investment to help justify the experts required to make the planning and execution of the turnaround a success. It's a bit of a chicken and egg scenario since you don't know what type of ROI this turnaround planning can create without having the experts come in to begin the process of identifying improvement opportunities.

Chris has developed a model based on turnaround experience with typical costs from each of the aspects of turnaround planning and typical costs for the maintenance activities. This model is in an excel spreadsheets so that the assumptions can be easily changed to fit the unique aspects of each process manufacturer. Both cost avoidance and increased revenue from improved plant performance is calculated, each based on the size of the process and amount of equipment considered.

By taking a comprehensive planning approach, and getting an early start, turnarounds do not have to cause quite the number of gray hairs that they have traditionally been known to cause.

Update: Mitzi Amon, director of marketing for Emerson Electrical Reliability Services team adds that the prioritization is accomplished by performing online diagnostic testing prior to the turnaround to determine what electrical equipment needs to be serviced during the turnaround. This helps clearly define maintenance work scope during the turnaround and what can be done prior to the the turnaround.

Technorati Tags: | | | |

September 20, 2007 in Asset Optimization, in Chemical, in Emerson Exchange, in Plant Equipment, in Refining, in Variability Management | Comments (0)

Building the Plan for Successful Plant Turnarounds

by Jim Cahill

A leading research organization, the Aberdeen Group, says it well when they say:

In asset intensive industries, such as automotive, metals, mining, oil and gas, process manufacturing, utilities, and the public sector, the reliability and productivity of capital assets is essential to an organization's financial success. Maintenance of these assets can dramatically impact the overall performance and useful life of an asset.

Petrochemical manufacturers definitely consider themselves in this "asset intensive" group. As such, solid maintenance programs are essential. And it is especially critical to plan the times when they are shut down for maintenance. Known in industry parlance as a turnaround, these may happen only every 4-6 years. This means they frequently involve new personnel as people move on to new roles.

A Houston, Texas-based petrochemical manufacturer saw an Emerson Exchange presentation given by Emerson's Instrument & Valve Services (IVS) consultant Wade Enns. He described a Northern Alberta Oil Sands production project with 120,000 I/O to commission. A key to the success of this project was the use of the Smart Start project services methodology. It helped bring a well thought out plan and order to this huge commissioning task.

This methodology and associated software provides embedded check sheets and commissioning procedures for 196 specific equipment types, customized check sheets for planning and checking off tasks during the turnaround as they are completed. The process also helps prioritize the maintenance activities and documents them to provide an audit trail, should the refiner need to refer back to the maintenance activities performance.

The petrochemical manufacturer shared how they had real problems with their last turnaround with scheduling and quality of the work performed. Obviously, any delays impacting the start-up schedule mean lost revenue.

The IVS team worked with the manufacturer to plan the maintenance turnaround on the process with 600 loops and 1800 devices. The process began by building a Smart Start Project Tool database to capture the entire scope of the instruments and valves which were in use. The team took advantage of the plants installed AMS Device Manager. Next, to fully understand and document how everything was installed, they performed "loop walk-downs". This helped put together the plan for the priority and order of the maintenance to be performed.

Working collaboratively, the maintenance and IVS team fully documented and received signoff on the plan in time for the turnaround. With milestones in place, the team could catch deviations from the plan early so that additional resources could help in these areas.

The results were what this manufacturer wanted--a smooth turnaround executed in the allotted time. Given the pressures on everyone to get the maintenance work done in the allotted schedule, having this well thought out and documented plan definitely helped reduce the stress along the way.

Technorati Tags: | | | |

April 5, 2007 in Chemical, in Plant Equipment | Comments (0)

Custody Transfer in the Sarbanes-Oxley Era

by Jim Cahill

Many process manufacturers have flow metering stations where ownership of incoming raw materials, intermediates, and/or outgoing products change. This custody transfer process is common with oil and gas producers, refiners, and chemical/petrochemical manufacturers.

Accuracy is critical since these measurements impact the bottom lines for both the seller and buyer. And, with the introduction in the U. S. of the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act of 2002, companies are required to put the controls in place to prove the accuracy of these measurements. Other countries have similar regulations requiring these documented proof-of-accuracy processes.

Robert Fallwell, a regional manager in Emerson’s Metco Services business, has written an excellent article, Sarbanes-Oxley audits: coming soon in the July issue of Control Engineering magazine.

Robert shares his expertise on how process manufacturers need to prepare for the SOX auditors. He boils it down to:

…they ask for proof that flow measurements are accurate, that you have procedures to ensure measurement accuracy, and that the plant’s operators, engineers, and production accountants have been trained in the correct procedures for the measurement control process.
The article is filled with advice on how to get ready, where to start in your process, and even 9 steps on how to comply with SOX. In addition to the expertise Robert and the METCO team bring to SOX compliance planning, Emerson has well-established flow technology and calibration management software help assure accuracy over time.

If your business is impacted by SOX or similar regulations, you’ll want to incorporate some of the ideas presented in this article.

Technorati Tags: | | | |

August 8, 2006 in Chemical, in Custody Transfer, in Measurement, in Oil & Gas, in Refining, in Regulatory Compliance | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

Using Model Predictive Control to Reduce Steam Usage in Distillation Columns

by Jim Cahill

A continuing theme to several of these blog posts is how process manufacturers are looking for ways to improve energy efficiency in these times of high energy costs. One way to do this is to optimize the steam required for a distillation process.

I caught up with Pete Sharpe whom you may recall from an earlier post on reducing costs of APC projects using pre-engineered applications. Pete has recently completed some work for a specialty chemical manufacturer that wanted to improve the performance of the distillation columns by decreasing the steam required and decreasing the reflux flows to the columns.

Pete worked with the process engineers to apply model predictive control (MPC) technology found in the SmartProcess Distillation Optimizer. This application is one of the pre-engineered SmartProcess applications Pete described in the earlier post.

The distillation process is a classic multivariable problem with control variables, manipulated variables and constraint variables.
DistillationColumnMPCApplic.jpg

Using model predictive control, the column can be controlled and operated as a unit instead of a collection of loops.

In addition to reduced operator load, the process engineer identified 400 lb/hour savings in steam on one of the columns and close to 900 lb/hr on the first column where the Distillation Optimizer application was implemented. With a cost for 135 psi steam of $5 per klb, this translates into energy savings of more than $50,000 USD for these particular columns. This savings adds up as all of the distillation columns on site are converted over from multi-loop control to MPC-based control. Steam reductions are a result of lower reflux flows that have been reduced by about 20%. While this change increases the average overhead impurities as is expected, it is well within specifications.

Now that the Distillation Optimizer has demonstrated stable results on two of the columns, Pete is working with the process engineers to implement it on the remaining columns over time. Beyond better performance and increased efficiency, the best measure of the success to date has been operators leaving the MPC control on more than 90% of the time. This is one of the true tests according to Pete and the Advanced Automation Services team.

Technorati Tags: | | | | | |

June 28, 2006 in Chemical, in Distillation Column, in Energy Management, in Process Optimization | Comments (2)

Praxair Wins Plant Innovation Award by Increasing Efficiency

by Jim Cahill

Congratulations to Praxair's Geismer, Louisiana methane reforming production facility for winning Chemical Processing magazine's Plant Innovation Award.

Praxair’s innovations were the result of their objectives to reduce energy (natural gas) usage while meeting the production demands for CO, H2 and steam much of which is exported to customers’ neighboring plants. The Geismar facility is comprised of four steam reformer plants of different age. The key challenge was to allocate load based on current plant performance and product slate.

I spoke with Chris Hawkins, a Senior Consultant and Technology Manager in Emerson's Asset Optimization organization. The AO team worked with Praxair to design advanced site optimization using the AMS Optimizer to calculate values for key process variables in real-time to increase the energy efficiency and consistency of each of the individual units. This work was combined with some model predictive control strategies implemented by the Praxair project team.

Working with the Praxair team, AO team members developed detailed models in the AMS Optimizer for each of the operational components of the site. The models compare the current plant operation and customer demands to determine the most economic set of production setpoints across the multiple units. These setpoints are automatically sent to the lower level control systems to keep the process running at optimal efficiency.

Chemical Process magazine reported the following results from the project:

Individually, the MPC systems increased in the carbon monoxide recovery on the cold boxes an average of 5-8% across multiple units, and much more consistently running of the units during production changes and load disturbances. Full implementation of this approach cut energy usage by over 1.0% for the facility. While that may not seem like a large percentage, for a site of this size, such a reduction equates to several hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in savings and provided a project pay back on the order of 2 years.

Technorati Tags: | | | | |

June 5, 2006 in Chemical, in Process Optimization, in Project Services | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

Safety Compliance for European Chemical Manufacturers

by Jim Cahill

I recently heard a presentation from one of our Chemical industry experts, Peter Cox, an Operations Consultant based in our Emerson Belgium office. Peter spent 14 years with BASF in various engineering and management positions before joining Emerson.

One of the key issues European Union chemical manufacturers are facing is that they ensure compliance with the SEVESO II Directive released in 2005 (COMAH in the United Kingdom.)

The guidelines were named after an industrial accident which occurred in Seveso, Italy in 1976.

The directive states the requirement for a mandatory review to prove compliance with the safety regulations at least every five years for every plant in the European Union and U.K which falls under these directives.

In an earlier post I discussed how Emerson safety experts are helping process manufacturers use the IEC 61511 performance-base safety standards to address these safety regulations.

Peter believes that Chemical manufacturers must take a holistic look at the safety lifecycle from risk identification, to the classification of these risks, to the design of the safety function, through the ongoing maintenance and testing of these safety functions.

Emerson is helping Chemical manufacturers in this area with safety expertise and smart safety instrumented system technologies.

Technorati Tags: | | | | | |

April 20, 2006 in Chemical, in Safety | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)