A New Dawn in Refining – How next generation software tools are adding unparalleled flexibility to refinery operations allowing them to meet the differing demands of working in Africa

Did you see Roy Calder's presentation at PARTC?

A New Dawn in Refining – How next generation software tools are adding unparalleled flexibility to refinery operations allowing them to meet the differing demands of working in Africa

ABSTRACT
African refiners work in very different environment to their European, American and Asian competitors. With local regulation as well as capacity and logistical issues being added to the standard mix of economic and safety issues there is a growing realisation that today’s production tools may not be delivering a flexible enough approach to today’s refining challenges.


Global issues such as high crude prices and under utilisation of capacity and a changing product demand may not be the major issues affecting the decision making processes in an African refinery organisation. However the ability to plan crude purchases against the demands of the market and getting all this to fit within the actual operating envelope of the refinery means that existing decision making processes no longer meet the needs of operations and, more importantly, shareholders. Today an African refinery needs to be able to bring in the right crudes at the right prices to meet not only market demand but also to deliver demonstrable financial results.

Invensys has delivered numerous solutions to companies demanding an answer to the underlying issues raised by the differing challenges that each face based on both market, geographic and technological issues. This work has led to the development of an integrated toolset which forms the basis of this paper.
This paper will build on our previous work and will show how our toolset is growing and how it has been applied to a number of sites globally.

Authors:
Roy Calder – Invensys, United Kingdom*
Chris Hotblack – Invensys, United Kingdom
Dr Martin Turk – Invensys, United States
Dr Harpreet Gulati – Invensys, United States
Dr Rachel McCarthy - Invensys, United Kingdom

To get a copy of the presentation, email me at joseph.mcmullen@invensys.com