Part One of this paper (HE, March 2018, pp 101-108) had discussed a methodology, developed by the authors of this article series, to benchmark a refinery’s fuels blending system. This methodology produces two indices, namely, automation effectiveness and operational efficiency, to assess both refinery’s blending infrastructure and its blending execution practices. This methodology also creates a comparative ranking to compare with other refinery’s blending system. It also gives qualitative and quantitative criterion for the required investment to upgrade their fuel blending system to bring at par with other refineries in the world and to capture the lost benefits due to sub-optimum blending system at the refinery.
This part two of the series discusses how this methodology is executed by presenting the phased process in a case study for 300KB/day refinery in south Texas, USA. The services of the authors of this paper were retained by the refinery to assess the current state of their fuel blending and recommend the steps to upgrade / revamp their blending system, if found feasible, both technically and economically.
An abridged version of this paper is published in “Bench-marking Fuel Blending Systems, Part-Two”, Hydrocarbon Engineering, March 2018, pp 67-72
A typical refinery produces about 75-80% of its crude throughput and produces its fuel products (gasoline, diesel, LPG, fuel oil) by blending 10-12 refinery products, which varies in both quality and monetary value. These fuel products have very strict specifications to meet and refineries use automated fuels blending control systems to optimize and control their properties. Any shortfalls in the delivered products specs, delays, and quality giveaways affect the enterprise bottom-line severely. Refinery management always looks for ways to identify and correct and enhance the shortcomings of their fuels blending systems.
This paper discusses a methodology to benchmark the state of fuels blending systems in a refinery to compare with other refineries by using two indices, Automation Effectiveness (AE) and Operational Efficiency (OE). These two indices also gauge the budgetary investment required to either convert a manual system to an automated system or upgrade automated system to a state-of-the-art blending control system.
An abridged version of this paper is published in “Bench-marking Fuel Blending Systems, Part-One”, Hydrocarbon Engineering, March 2018, pp 101-108. This download is the original manuscript. Copyright of published paper by HE prevents us from downloading here.
This paper discusses the design of a fuels blending header for an in-line blending system. It is very important to design the header for a fully developed and well-mixed flow from components tanks to header and then from header to the final product tank. Most importantly, a methodology is suggested to establish the order of component connection points at the header as they are affected by the component properties such as flow regime, density, and vapor pressure. This paper takes the myth out of “blend header is just a piece of pipe.”