October 2012

Natural gas vehicles could be gaining tractionA new report from PIRA Energy Group says that the sheer volume of US recoverable gas resources relative to expected demand suggests that benchmark Henry H..

Marginal increase forecast in North American lubricant marketAlthough it is estimated that there will be a 3% increase in tonnage carried by private fleet operators in the US through 2016, this is exp..

New nanoscale reference material to be known as P25The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued a new nanoscale reference material for use in a wide range of environmental, hea..

Increased coal-to-olefins processes in ChinaChina’s significant domestic supply of coal, combined with a domestic shortage of several key chemical feedstocks, especially ethylene and propylene, a..

New fuel standards in the USThe US government recently finalized standards that will increase fuel economy to the equivalent of 54.5 mpg for cars and light-duty trucks by model year 2025. When combine..

Invensys introduces new technology offeringsSoftware and technology provider Invensys Operations Management recently released a program to help clients modernize and improve the performance of aging c..

Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. has a contract from Methanex Corp. to provide engineering, procurement and construction services for a methanol production facility in Louisiana. Officials estimate the c..

A subsidiary of Foster Wheeler AG’s Global Engineering and Construction Group has a contract from Petrobras for a world-scale grassroots gas-to-chemicals complex—Complexo Gás-Quími..

Clariant has inaugurated what is said to be Germany’s biggest pilot plant for producing climate-friendly cellulose ethanol from agricultural waste. Located in Straubing, Bavaria, and supported by..

KAR Group has announced the third expansion of its Kalak refinery to 185,000 bpd. Process units and utilities are being provided by Ventech Engineers LLC of Pasadena, Texas. Ventech has provided modul..

Jilin Qianyuan Energy Development has selected Chemtex, along with Black & Veatch’s patented PRICO LNG technology, to deliver a major liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility. Expected to be complete..

Video highlights steam system designSpirax Sarco’s Steam DesignPro video commercial, hosted on the Spirax Sarco YouTube channel, demonstrates the software’s capabilities to mechanical engine..

Clamp-on process meter The CL420 clamp-on process meter is said to safely measure 0–120 mA DC process-control signals without breaking the loop. Typical applications include distributed control s..

Every plant wants to get more service life from site machinery. Since about 1990, quite a number of start-up consulting companies have formed to advise clients on equipment life extension. These compa..

Several trends have already impacted the distributed control system (DCS) market and are likely to continue over the next few years. These include both product- and technology-related trends and gener..

The hydrocarbon processing industry needs reliable and economic sources of water for present and future operations. Ensuring a sustainable water supply requires a focused effort to evaluate the qualit..

The only constant is change. In the hydrocarbon processing industry (HPI), change facilitates new discoveries process technologies and products to resolve problems. Likewise, change reshapes markets f..

The industry consultant believes auto-quench, excursion control and bed-outlet layers should join auto-depressure as industry-best practice for all hydrocrackers.

APC with inferential modeling was successfully applied to pygas hydrogenation units. The lengthening of the catalyst run length limits downtime for both the pygas unit and upstream units such as the steam cracker.

While there are managers in the process industry that see training control engineers as a “no-brainer,” these are very much in the minority. They may send staff on courses covering configura..

Automated fault detection and diagnosis systems (AFDDSs) are well established in many consumer and industrial sectors.1 The conventional limit-value based (high/low alarms) fault detection and diagnos..

This case history describes the development of the inferential models used in open-loop and closed-loop applications, laboratory and analyzer update mechanisms, and APC model generation.

Part two of this series focuses on the selection of FCC catalysts, methods for hydroprocessing light cycle oil (LCO) and the production of diesel fuel from FCC byproducts.

The new direct oxidation process is an economic method for sulfur recovery from low-H2S content gases, converting H2S in a gas catalytic process directly to elemental sulfur.

Process heaters are the largest consumers of energy in most plants. A refinery, on average, burns approximately 2 billion Btu/hr of fuel in fired heaters. The total quantity of fuel burned (heat relea..

Process control schemes involving fluid-flow machinery with traditional adjustable speed drives (ASDs) or modules encounter limitations such as control flexibility and accuracy. In this context, the t..