The Best Modeling Practices to Maximize the Profits in the Refining Industry

摘要

The refining and petrochemical industries are undergoing significant volatile and unpredictable market scenarios. At the same time, crudes are becoming heavier, while specifications and properties of fuels are becoming more stringent to meet pollution control regulations and highly competitive market demands. To remain viable and profitable, prediction and optimization tools will play increasingly more crucial roles in decision-making. Abu Dhabi Oil Refining Company (TAKREER) has adopted state-of-the-art modeling and simulation tools to address several requirements like operations prediction and optimization, process monitoring, diagnosis and troubleshooting of operational problems, as well as verification of equipment's structural integrity. Process Modeling & Linear Programming (LP) Modeling is a key focus area, which TAKREER has established to lead and implement Operational Excellence and industrial best practices in modeling across TAKREER. A business workflow has been developed and put into practice to streamline activities starting with data acquisition, process simulation, LP vectors generation, and operations optimization to maximize company profit margins. The developed process models are being deployed and utilized by refinery process engineers for routine unit monitoring purposes. In some cases, modeling solutions are not available off-the-shelf, due to non-standard unit configurations or non-availability in the commercial process simulator portfolio. TAKREER Research Centre (TRC) is the R&D wing of TAKREER, which has laboratories equipped with latest analytical techniques, and sophisticated experimental facilities with dedicated bench scale catalytic reactors and pilot plant facilities. Thus, the process modeling & simulation team at TRC is uniquely privileged to develop customized first principles models to deal with such unit and reactor configurations and deliver solutions with confidence to the refineries. This paper will demonstrate the synergistic collaboration among the different sections in TRC and in TAKREER business units in adopting and implementing the best modeling practices to maximize profits and assets integrity.