Emerson Exchange 365

A Q&A with Emerson Process Management’s refining experts.

Gary Hawkins, senior refining consultant
Ed Schodowski, director refining sales – Global Industry Solutions Group
Tim Olsen, global refining program manager

Emerson Exchange Refining & Petrochemicals Industry Forum will be held Monday, Sept. 30, 2:30-4:30 p.m. Go here for more information on Emerson’s Refining Solutions.

What are the major issues and trends facing the refining industry?

• With the abundance of less expensive shale oil in North America, refiners are taking advantage of this lighter crude oil stock.  However, this also creates challenges with more crude blending to get the right balance for downstream unit utilization. In addition, blending crudes can create incompatibility issues with accelerated fouling in the crude unit heat exchanger train, so monitoring for accelerated fouling is a must to avoid repeat blending incompatible crudes in the future.
• The EU Energy Efficiency Directive is driving companies to reduce energy usage, so companies are looking for strategic ways and new technologies that impact energy efficiency. 
• The vision of a pervasive, plant-wide wireless network of field devices that can facilitate maintenance leading to higher on-stream availability and safer operations.  Transition periods like startup and shutdown have a higher probability of safety incidents, so keeping the plant running mitigates opportunities for safety incidents.

What are the biggest challenges/barriers facing the refining industry?

• Increased regulatory reporting requirements and penalties for increased energy use (carbon taxes).
• Reactive maintenance on operating projects: unexpected process equipment failures, high maintenance costs, lost production opportunities.
• For Greenfield projects, how to get the best return on this multi-million investment. 
• The shortage of skilled resources is a big challenge with upstream pulling personnel away from downstream. With a shortage, refiners are expecting more assistance by outsourcing non-core work and looking for solutions from automation providers.
• There is a need for crude, natural gas and fuel product infrastructure (pipelines) to distribute.  Some regions have flat demand, so refiners are looking for other markets, including exporting.

What are the biggest opportunities facing the refining industry?

• Processing of shale oil – perceived as best cost, light, sweet and easy to process – but there are challenges related to crude blending to get the right balance for downstream unit utilization.
• Improving margins with high ROI projects in the automation space utilizing new technologies.
• Reduced cost of entry for energy measurements.
• Training, simulation and smart technology to assist with keeping refineries running reliably and safely despite shortage of skilled workers.

What can Emerson do to help its refining clients?

• Serve as a solutions provider who partners with refiners for training, smart technology, consulting, turnarounds and all automation project management.
• Provide energy-saving solutions that include SmartProcess advanced control solutions and improved measurement of energy flows utilizing new technologies like wireless and acoustic monitoring.
• Implement a plant-wide network of international standard WirelessHART (IEC 62591) field devices that brings value to the organization by improving asset health awareness and reliability, thus also improving process availability. This serves as a second layer of automation on top of and augmenting the wired layer of automation to meet market demands.
• Help clients understand process energy variability and visibility and how it can impact efficiency.
• Illustrate how investments in a progressive culture to measure, analyze, alert and take action mean companies actually spend less on maintenance and have higher reliability than a reactive maintenance culture. 

What is your take on the long-term outlook for the refining industry?

• In the next 20 years, refining capacity will expand in the undeveloped world, while remaining flat in the developed world.  These new projects will be done with the most energy-efficient technologies, which will raise the bar for existing refineries in the developed world.  Existing refineries will need to adopt energy improvement technologies that keep their margins competitive with the world market.
• Large-scale projects that are being defined today are already considering including a secondary automation layer.  Not all may include this feature in the initial design, but those that do are setting the trend for future projects. The cost-benefit analysis is increasingly driving this concept as newer projects are ever-increasing in production capacity. Operating companies are already installing wireless networks to improve process availability, with more developing implementation plans.  The scalable nature of implementation allows for the most critical of the unmonitored assets to be addressed first, with other measurements to follow.
• There is an oversupply of refinery capacity with new refineries still coming online.  This means the less efficient and obsolete refiners will close.  There will be a shift in the overall efficiency of refining with Solomon Associates benchmarking fourth quartile refiners at the highest risk of shutting down.  The third quartile refiners will become the new fourth quartile – basically, the benchmark for refiners’ quartile ranking will be elevated.

Presentations at Emerson Exchange related to refining Include:

• Understanding Process Variability: Causes, Costs and Cures – Doug White
• How To Value New Measurements – Doug White
• How to Answer When Your Boss Asks; Why Modernize? – John Dolenc and Doug White
• How To Justify Plant Reliability Improvements – Doug White
• The missing measurements – Essential for long term reliability in petroleum processing – Gary Hawkins
• The PEMEX Journey to Improved Cooling Tower Reliability, From Wireless Data to Actionable Information Automatically – Marcelo Carugo, Nikki Bishop, and Yair Martinez
• How Does a Heat Exchanger Automatically Tell You How It's Feeling? Ask PEMEX! – Marcelo Carugo, Nikki Bishop, and Gerardo Palomo
• A Dynamic Duo: AMS Machinery Manager and Essential Asset Monitoring Solutions to the Rescue! – Steve Briggs, Nikki Bishop, and Robert Skeirik
• Blend Optimization and Control Strategy for Today’s Refinery – Patrick Truesdale and John Ward
• How to Assess Risk of Measurement Uncertainty with Custody Measurements – Patrick Truesdale and Sudhir Jain