Environment & Safety Gas Processing/LNG Maintenance & Reliability Petrochemicals Process Control Process Optimization Project Management Refining

Maintenance & Reliability

HP Reliability: Fact-checking list from recent reliability conferences

Hydrocarbon Processing Staff: Bloch, Heinz P.

Whenever HP editors attend technical conferences, their primary goals include observing industry practices, finding facts and spotting trends. Fact or fictionUnfortunately, presenters sometimes relate..

HP Water Management: Update: Online measurement of oxidizing biocides

MarTech Systems, Inc.: Huchler, L. A.

Nearly all owners of industrial cooling towers feed oxidizing biocides—chlorine (Cl) and bromine (Br)—to kill bacteria in the recirculating cooling water. Minimizing the populations of bacte..

HP Brief

Hydrocarbon Processing Staff: Thinnes, Billy

LyondellBasell plans to expand North American ethylene capacityLyondellBasell will raise its ethylene capacity in North America by 18% in coming years through several debottlenecking projects. Locatio..

HP Innovations: Innovations

Hydrocarbon Processing Staff: Blume, Adrienne

Flowmeter uses Coriolis force in measurementThe Sitrans FC430 flowmeter from Siemens AG is capable of measuring liquids and gases using the Coriolis principle. Flows can be measured with a precision o..

Overcome barriers to proper planning and scheduling

T.A. Cook Consultants Inc.: Wanichko, J.

Planning and scheduling must work hand-in-hand for a turnaround, outage or shutdown to be executed to budget and schedule. Unless proper diligence is given up-front to planning and scheduling, no amou..

Update on US refinery production outages

Unplanned and planned production outages at US refineries, as reported by Dow Jones Newswires.

Monitor and minimize corrosion in high-TAN crude processing

Indian Oil Corp. Ltd., Mathura Refinery: Ghoshal, S.  |  Sainik, V.

In addition to inhibitor dosing, intensive corrosion monitoring and analytical tests play a major role in equipment and piping health monitoring and in analyzing stream properties online.

Mitigate reactor failures due to graphitization

SABIC Technology Centre: Al-Enazi, S.  |  Al-Meshari, A.  |  Abdelgalil, A.

Graphitization occurs in carbon steel (CS) reactors in high-temperature service (> 455°C). As discussed in this case history, the shell of a methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) reactor became s..

Corrosion under insulation is a hidden problem

The Sherwin-Williams Co.: Hanratty, T.

Corrosion under insulation (CUI) is one of the costliest avoidable problems facing the hydrocarbon processing industry (HPI) today. CUI afflicts refineries—specifically, the steel piping, storage..

Operator response to alarms is an important protection layer

Praxair: Limaye, R.

Operator response to alarms is important layers of protection (LOP). When implemented with good design, engineering and maintenance practices, an alarm can help reduce the safety integrity level (SIL)..