Special Focus: Maintenance and Reliability
According to Löfsten, “the costs of maintenance are estimated to be between 15% and 40% of production costs.” Consequently, efforts to reduce such costs without compromising risk to equipment, personnel safety and environmental integrity are welcomed.
Modern advanced control and monitoring systems for centrifugal compressors support compression plant operation at the highest possible efficiency, availability and reliability.
Steam-surface condensers are used throughout the refining, petrochemical and chemical industries.
Process Optimization
The centrifugal compressor has been the workhorse of the oil and gas industry for decades.
Digital Technologies
In the hydrocarbon and other process industries, engineering and operations teams have a fundamental responsibility to maximize asset profitability.
Environment and Safety
Based on new environmental regulations focusing on volatile organic compounds (VOCs) at the emissions point of a refinery’s sulfur recovery unit (SRU), Raffineria di Milazzo—a JV between Eni and Kuwait Petroleum Italia—carried out troubleshooting activities to identify and implement suitable actions to minimize the concentration of VOCs at the emissions point of the SRU complex.
Process Controls, Instrumentation, and Automation
One day at a refinery, operators call an instrument tech to the control room and point to the screen.
Terminals and Storage
Within hydrocarbon storage terminals, product pumps are the most vital rotating equipment for terminal operations and maintenance.
Columns
The efficient operation of crude oil distillation units (CDUs) improves profits and distillate yield while optimizing production costs and reliability.
Calculating flowrate through long, straight pipe under laminar flow regime is easy using standard equations of fluid mechanics.
Often, facilities hesitate to invest in monitoring rotating equipment until the machine fails. By that time, there is no background information, such as vibration or temperature data, to help site engineers diagnose the machine’s failure. However, by implementing a remote monitoring solution on healthy equipment, users can set a baseline of machine health to gain essential insights when the machine begins to fail.
In more complex petroleum refineries, a secondary processing step may be implemented in more complex petroleum refineries to produce more usable end products.
Trends and Resources
Given the global rise in energy costs, there has never been a better time to review and assess the efficiency of pumping systems—whatever their size, complexity or sphere of operation.
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