March 2008

Proper planning, personnel training and interdepartmental communications were keys to the success of this project

A comprehensive instruction program can help plant management prepare personnel for the new era of digital process control

Deploying a robust, IEC conformant safety instrumented system requires uncompromised competency in every step of the process

Two standards organizations provide this capability

Using statistical data compression important process changes can be quickly detected and identified

These techniques offer better process control and can improve the bottom line

Power supplies, cables and connectors are critical to project success

A quick analysis can help direct further efforts

An innovative method applies heat integration to cost-effectively retrofit bottlenecks in utility systems

Innovative approaches gain efficiency for distillation operations

The proposed method provides accurate results with less computation

Guidelines streamline choosing a heat exchanger to maximize process efficiencies

Advanced process control (APC) is labor intensive, requiring about one experienced engineer per three major units, a level of effort rarely matched, even in well-run plants. And to do the job right, ..

Energy conservation is of ever-increasing importance to process plants from the smallest to the largest. Gas streams that were flared a decade ago are now often recompressed and recycled back to the ..

There is no question about it. With a growing national population, the US must make critical decisions now about how it will address the increasing demand for energy. As the cleanest burning fossil fu..

Portals are readily available for organizations to take advantage of their ease-of-use and inherent collaboration potential. In many ways, the technology is "right for the times." Portals make use of..

BP's volte-face investment in oil sands, Shell's ominous allusions to a decline in gas, all this emperor's clothes nonsense in Alberta, supermajor share buybacks and the rise of the financial players ..

 BILLY THINNES, News Editor       Comments? Write: BT@HydrocarbonProcessing.com   ..

Low-sludge batch reactor system offers significant power savings Siemens Water Technologies' OMNIFLO interchange sequencing batch reactor (ISBR) system is claimed to provide the most energy-efficient ..

Fluor Corp. will provide integrated engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) for Marathon Oil Corp.'s projected $1.9 billion expansion and upgrade of the company's Detroit, Michigan, refinery...

PetroquímicaSuape started construction of a purified terefthalic acid (PTA) plant, to be built at Suape, in Ipojuca, Brazil. The plant is expected to be able to produce 640,000 tpy. The predicte..

  Foster Wheeler Energía, S.A. has a contract for a heat recovery steam generator (HRSG) with Sener, Ingeniería y Sistemas, S.A. for Petronor. The boiler will be integrated in a cogene..

The Qatar Fertilizer Co. (QAFCO) has an agreement with GE Oil & Gas for the supply of gas turbine and compressor technology for a fertilizer plant expansion project. The GE equipment will be used for..

  CB&I has a contract in excess of $60 million with Star Petroleum Refining Co. Ltd. to build a new jet fuel processing plant and related storage and shipping systems in Rayong Province, Thailand..

A consortium of AMEC, JAGAL and NETCO has been awarded a five-year contract by Mobil Producing Nigeria (MPN) for the upgrade and expansion of offshore and onshore oil and gas production facilities in..

A wireless way to free trapped data For most of the field devices in all but the newest plants, operators have a treasure trove of smart digital data that cannot be readily accessed and put to good us..

In 2007, China became the world's largest methanol producer and consumer. China also leads the world in the use of methanol as an alternative transportation fuel, blending nearly 1 billion gallons of ..

Occupational injury and illness metrics aren't optimal for gauging the effectiveness of a company's process safety program. The Baker Panel that investigated the 2005 BP refinery disaster in Texas Cit..

During the early stages of a project, engineers and estimators use rules of thumb to rapidly establish defensible cost estimates. These guidelines are usually based on historical breakdowns of cost co..

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has issued a comprehensive new report examining the potential for Arctic Alaska to remain a major contributor to US domestic energy supply. Key findings indicate tha..

ConocoPhillips (CP) reported a higher net income for fourth-quarter 2007 as compared to the same quarter in 2006 in its most recent filing. The company announced a net income of $4,371 million vs. $3,..

Ranking global coal resources I have been a regular reader of your very informative magazine. But, I would like to comment on an "HP Impact" item that ran in June 2007 ("Economic realities push coal'..

Understand the relationship between the pressure drop and the process system

US energy market outlook The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has recently been tasked to evaluate trends in the international trade of pe..