Atmospheric pressure combined with a partial vacuum within chemical plant or refinery tanks can result in some ego-deflating moments. This article will review three catastrophic vessel failures in detail and touch on several other incidents. A 4000-gal acid tank was destroyed by a siphoning action; a well maintained tank truck was destroyed during a routine delivery; and a large, brand new refi...

Oil refineries provide the lifeblood for global economic health, and disruptions to their operations have major worldwide impact. We are developing a large-scale intelligent refinery control system to assist human operators in controlling refineries during abnormal situations. Based primarily on reactive and procedural approaches to intelligent behavior, the Abnormal Event Guidance and Informat...

Ion exclusion is a chromatographic process which separates components from an impure feedstock on the basis of molecular size and charge. A pilot plant ion exclusion separator was constructed to determine the technical and economic feasibility of recovering sugar from refinery jet 4 (the feedstock identified as most promising in terms of ease of treatment). Extensive tests on jet 4 from the Mal...

The refinery business involves tasks spanning across several departments and requiring close coordination and collaboration among them. Present-day business decision support systems are tuned to individual departments and their work processes and are incapable of exploiting the intricate interdependencies among them. There is a need for a decision support system that provides a structured way t...

−− This work presents a stochastic multiperiod model for representing a petroleum refinery. Uncertainty is taken into account in parameters such as demands, product sale prices and crude oil prices. In the present work, uncertainty is considered as a set of discrete scenarios, each representing a possible shifting of market expectations. Every environment is weighted through an expected probabi...

Supply chain management is one key area that has gathered much interest from both the academic and business communities. Today’s many uncertainties require that supply chains be nimble and resilient in reacting to disruptions for sustainable operations. We look at a refinery supply chain and present a strategy for recovering from disruptions by heuristic rescheduling. This is important as refin...

The biofuel mix in transport in the UK must be increased from currently exploited 3.33% to the EU target mix of 10% by 2020. Under the face of this huge challenge, the most viable way forward is to process infrastructure-compatible intermediate, such as bio-oil from fast pyrolysis of lignocellulosic biomass, into biofuels. New facilities may integrate multiple distributed pyrolysis units produc...

The Technical University of Madrid (UPM) and REPSOL YPF are collaborating in the improvement in the estimation of the emiss ion factors for refinery flares. Flaring is an unavoidable process in the refining activity, both for safety reasons during upset processes (start-up, shut down, system blow-down) and when managing the disposal of waste gases with hydrocarbon from routine operations. The o...

This paper describes a simulation analysis of the impacts of a strategic fuels reserve (SFR) designed to limit the increase in gasoline prices in the days following a refinery disruption. The analysis is based on a computer simulation model developed for the California Energy Commission. The model simulates the supply of gasoline as the sum of refinery production, cargoes arriving from outside ...

Refineries are a source of emissions of volatile hydrocarbons that contribute to the formation of smog and ozone. Fugitive emissions of hydrocarbons are difficult to measure and quantify. Currently these emissions are estimated based on standard emission factors for the type and use of equipment installed. Differential absorption light detection and ranging (DIAL) can remotely measure concentra...