Emerson Exchange 365

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

The Emerson Exchange Refining & Petrochemicals Industry Forum will be held on Wednesday, April 2, from 10:45 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. Go here for more information on Emerson's Refining Solutions.

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

• Operating in an environment with very narrow margins because of increased global competition
• The EU Energy Efficiency Directive and high energy costs are driving companies to reduce energy usage, so companies are looking for strategic ways and new technologies that enhance 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.
• 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. This exporting leads to new competition.

What are the biggest opportunities facing the refining industry?

• 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.