Loss Prevention

Editorial Comment: Adopting digital technologies to enhance operations

What is the future of refining and petrochemical operations? One trend that has been the focus of many articles, whitepapers and conference presentations is the digital transformation of the hydrocarbon processing industry (HPI).

Inspection: A practical approach to internal inspection of pressure equipment

Internal inspections of pressure equipment involve a full inspection of the equipment. Inspection engineers and inspectors depend heavily on internal inspections to retrieve useful data, which includes information on active degradation mechanisms, corrosion rates, remaining equipment life, failure occurrences and failure expectations, among other critical details.

LOPA: A comprehensive analytical tool for deriving SIL targets and applicability review

Many industrial facilities, especially those in the chemical, oil and gas and petroleum industries, involve inherent risks in operations due to the processing of material that is hazardous in nature. It is necessary to precisely identify and analyze hazards, operability issues, associated risks and consequences.

Digital: How digital tools improve access to device information

Welcome to the future! The plant runs fully automated; robots glide silently back and forth, ensuring an optimized process; and your maintenance technician—with a few keystrokes—can tell you exactly how each piece of equipment is running. The promise of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has been delivered.

Cybersecurity visibility and resilience: Keys to protecting HSE/margins in operations

As digitalization accelerates in today’s downstream refining and petrochemical facilities, operators need to stay ahead of ever-growing cyber vulnerabilities in the operational technology (OT) layer—prime targets for threat actors—that may not be covered by traditional IT safeguards. Unfortunately, too often, that is not the case for a variety of reasons.

Brazilian developments in the biofuels market

Since the 1970s, Brazil has been a world reference in automotive biofuels, especially bioethanol produced from sugarcane. In 1973, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) forced a sharp rise in oil prices, triggering a massive slowdown in the country’s economic growth, which had been going through what was dubbed the “economic miracle,” with growth at an average of 12% of GDP. This study gives an overview of the biofuel sector in Brazil, along with the main business challenges and opportunities in this area.

Optimal gas analysis decisions improve ethylene plant operation

One of the most common and important building blocks in the petrochemical industry is ethylene, constituting a huge and fast-growing worldwide industry. Ethylene is an intermediate chemical used to manufacture many commercial products—approximately 200 MMt will be produced in 2020.

Digital: Technologies are advancing industry beyond alarm management

Let’s face it, alarm management is a fully mature body of knowledge. Since the mid-1990s, industry has improved thousands of alarm systems, transforming them from overloaded nuisances to valuable operator tools for abnormal situation detection and response.

Reliability: Things rarely heard at reliability conferences

We can only guess how many reliability conferences we have attended since accepting job offers in the refining or chemical processing industries. In my case, starting in 1965, it is somewhere between 60 and 80. If, in each of these conferences I listened to six presentations, the number of sessions attended is perhaps 400.

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