Current Issue: September 2024

Nothing will impede a successful plant turnaround like improper planning. One aspect of this planning is effective inventory management, and the keys to achieving this are properly identifying and communicating maintenance needs.

Operators in oil and gas manufacturing facilities have long depended on human machine interfaces (HMI) to offer a visual summary of process systems that simplifies the monitoring of crucial status and control data. A well-crafted graphical user interface enhances situational awareness, decreases workload and empowers operators to oversee the entire process, facilitating their focus to quickly address any abnormal scenarios.

Traces of particulate mercury sulfide (HgS) in stabilized crude oils transform to elemental mercury below 400°C in refinery distillation units. The authors evaluated this transformation and measured reaction rates and activation energies in crude oil and Hg-spiked mineral oil, using glass vessels at atmospheric pressure and a microunit at 1,000 psig.

Refiners have used offline process models for decades. The next generation of solutions is anticipated to operate automatically, integrate with legacy systems and provide transparency site-wide.  

Prompt engineering is an emerging discipline at the intersection of AI and process engineering and will undoubtedly contribute to the hydrocarbon and green molecules processing industries. Parts 1 and 2 (October 2024) of this article explore and provide a glimpse of how this technique can help process engineers and operators to manage the power of advanced AI models to optimize processes, contribute to solve complex problems, and improve operational efficiency in refineries and petrochemical plants.  

This article provides seven best practices that should be kept in mind for successful plant turnaround management. 

The authors’ company has developed a novel approach with a digital algorithm to effectively estimate the current cyclone erosion and predict future erosion based on operating conditions. With this approach, refiners get an automatic way to better predict abrasion lining erosion for both reactors and regenerator cyclones daily from digital analytics, thus helping refiners quantify their monitoring.

To navigate this new digital world, organizations must find ways to bring in new technologies to support the limited personnel they have, but without increasing the complexity of those people’s jobs or overwhelming them with raw data they are not trained to use. The solution is to implement a predictive maintenance technology plan founded on a boundless automation vision of seamlessly moving contextualized data wherever it is needed.

From an industrial perspective, effective communication is an integral part of achieving an injury-free workplace. This article provides the benefits of developing a safety management system to build a culture of safety in plants.

This article will provide an in-depth insight of an operator training simulator, as well as the basic features of creating a virtual plant in which the operators are allowed to train and test various operating scenarios. It will also highlight the inbuilt scenarios inside the model—most importantly, the startup, shutdown and specific upset scenarios.  

The world is increasingly turning its attention to alternative fuels in the quest for net-zero emissions, and hydrogen (H2) is at the forefront of this transformative shift. This article will discuss the benefits of H2, comparisons to alternative energies, sustainability and environmental implications, and H2’s potential. 

This article examines the application of solvent absorption-based post combustion capture for refinery/site-specific factors and quantifies the impact this will have on CCS CAPEX/OPEX. This analysis helps to determine the optimum approach for any individual refinery site.

This article will evaluate zero-liquid discharge technologies and the preliminary treatment, disposal or further treatment for a preliminary treated system.  

A very important—and sometimes overlooked—unit operation within processing facilities is makeup water treatment for steam generators and other processes. Many cases have been documented in which makeup system upsets have led to boiler tube failures that partially or completely shut down unit processes. This article serves as a guide for those employees who may be on a steep learning curve when it comes to makeup system understanding.