The global economy and regional regulations are placing greater economic pressures on refiners in the form of increased pricing pressure that affect profitability and require enhanced performance to allow the plant to remain profitable. Additionally, regulatory compliance and adherence to increasing stringent safety standards can adversely affect a refinery’s bottom line. Decreased margin from increased competition is forcing refiners to evaluate means to run more profitably. Refineries have been implementing profit generating activities for years, but the key is implementation and sustainability of a full-scale optimization program.
THE INVENSYS SOLUTION:
Invensys provides several optimization solutions. Invensys has extended its best-in-class solutions under SimSci for refinery optimization through integration of various individual products and applications designed to capture all areas of profit opportunity by providing the best optimization and regulatory compliance solutions for a refinery. These new solutions take SimSci’s leadership in refining optimization to a higher level. The various solutions allow the refinery to choose the level of optimization that is appropriate for their current situation.
Off-sites: Tank farms make up a large portion of a refining complex. Increased automation and operational performance reduces the cost of terminal operations, while at the same time improving safety compliance and business performance. Invensys Off-sites solutions have been in use in terminal and refinery sites globally for over 25 years, serving all of the major oil companies.
Process Optimization: ROMeo is the standard for process optimization in refining and can be used for either performance monitoring or process optimization. During performance monitoring, ROMeo trends the performance of equipment to identify problems and pinpoint equipment operational issues. An example would be the performance monitoring of a crude pre-heat train to monitor exchanger fouling and running case-studies to view which heat exchanger would impact profitability the most when cleaned. During process optimization, ROMeo automatically imports process data, reconciles that data, and optimizes the process within a set of operational bounds. One example would be to minimize the usage of hydrogen when upgrading heavier crude oil. In this example, ROMeo would be used to monitor hydrogen usage and minimize its consumption by altering the flow and conditions (temperature and pressure) of the various feedstocks.
Integrating ROMeo with Planning, Scheduling and Off-sites: Refiners can now leverage blend operations and optimization practices to improve efficiency and profitability across the entire refinery. Crude blend data available from off-sites blending operations can be used as input to process optimization software. Product properties that are calculated by process optimization software can then be used in off-sites product blending operations.
Visualization: Wonderware Intelligence provides the visualization technology that allows operators key performance indicator (KPI) visibility and monitoring through interactive dashboards in near real-time. This provides key information in desired context across Invensys and non-Invensys sources of operations data to achieve on the spot operational decision-making.
Automation: ArchestrA Workflow is powerful business process management software, a) helping enforce consistent policy and procedural execution from plant automation to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), b) enabling a reduction in process and response latency c) and providing the open framework to support the necessary governance, including notifications, escalations and approvals of all stakeholders in the collaboration environment. Mobile Solutions, from Wonderware IntelaTrac, enable workflow, data collection and general task management for plant operations, maintenance management, production tracking and compliance applications. Mobile Solutions result in improved operational discipline and reliability, increased workforce productivity, and enhanced safety and compliance. Condition Manager, from Avantis, is tied to asset health, reliability and/or availability. Predicting asset failures before they occur on critical refinery equipment can result in significant costs savings. Condition Manager collects data from any plant floor system which is OPC-compliant, analyzes that data, then acts upon it – letting operators know of any problematic conditions early enough to take corrective action before they escalate into serious upsets or, worse yet, unplanned shutdowns.
Advanced Process Control: While ROMeo is able to optimize operations once they have achieved steady-state, Connoisseur, the APC solution from SimSci-Esscor, offers optimization within a smaller time-frame. APC can help control a process to desired set-points to minimize fluctuation in the controllers and optimize output.
ACA.HF: The ACA.HF is the new standard in safety, simplicity, reliability, and accuracy for analysis of HF alkylation process performance. ACA.HF is a way to safely and simply obtain online measurement of %HF, %Water and %ASO in HF alkylation. This solution is an affordable alternative to FTNIR with highly reliable and repeatable accuracy. In fact, ACA.HF exceeds the precision of HF analysis with FTNIR. ACA.HF is a multivariable analyzer based on the application of proven Foxboro measurement technologies that are long-established in online analysis of process streams. The fact that measurements can be made in real-time with no safety risk allows refineries to enjoy the results without the risk of an accident or plant downtime.
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