The March 2005 British Petroleum (BP) Texas City Refinery disaster provided a stimulus to examine the state of process safety in the U.S. refining industry. Participatory action researchers conducted a nation-wide mail-back survey of United Steelworkers local unions and collected data from 51 unionized refineries. The study examined the prevalence of highly hazardous conditions key to the Texas...

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...

Background: Combustion of fossil fuels contributes to sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions. To deal with this issue, the government of Iran has appointed the oil refineries to upgrade their installations and produce high quality fuels. Thus, this study investigated the status of SO2 emissions in Iran and the capability of advanced technologies to control SO2 emissions. Methods: The status of SO2 em...

In recent years, hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling have been applied to extract crude oil from tight reservoirs, including the Bakken formation. There is growing interest in understanding the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with the development of tight oil. We conducted a life cycle assessment of Bakken crude using data from operations throughout the supply chain, includin...

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 ...