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Recommended guidelines can help prevent fires caused by static electricity

Newson Gale: O’Brien, M.

For any person working in the oil and gas industry who is responsible for the safety of employees, colleagues, plant equipment and property, one of the most potentially confusing aspects in providing ..

Mitigate fouling in crude unit overhead—Part 2

CH2M Hill: Sloley, A. W.

Up to 50% of the refinery’s entire corrosion expense may occur in the crude unit. The root causes of the fouling and corrosion issues are often linked to the basic unit configuration choices, as ..

Improve solvent recovery in wax production

CSIR-Indian Institute of Petroleum: Garg, M. O.  |  Kumar, S.  |  Nanoti, S. M.  |  Ghosh, P.

The solvent-recovery section of the deoiling unit for wax production consumes substantial energy. In this study, the effects of operating conditions (pressure), energy consumption and cost, and proces..

Update temperature control for a Claus unit with neural networks

North-West University, School of Chemical and Minerals Engineering: Schabort, C. J.  |  Neomagus, H. W. J. P.

The Natref oil refinery in Sasolburg, South Africa, had experienced refractory problems in the sulfur recovery unit’s (SRU’s) combustion chamber since startup (Fig. 1). Even though the SRU w..

HP Reliability: Maintain proficiency in root-cause-failure analysis

Hydrocarbon Processing Staff: Bloch, Heinz P.

Earlier in the year, the author attended a series of client and organizers’ presentations at the 2013 TapRooT Summit in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. TapRooT is a structured failure analysis and trouble..

HP Integration Strategies: Operational integrity management at Statoil

ARC Advisory Group: Reynolds, P.

Asset-intensive industries continue to suffer from unplanned downtime, failure to meet planned production rates, and too many safety and environmental incidents. Until companies can manage and mitigat..

HP Automation Safety: MTTR: Reality vs. calculation

exida LLC: Goble, W.

Many reliability engineers trained before IEC 61508 know the acronym MTTR as “mean time to repair.” I certainly learned that definition. Naturally, I think of the time it takes to repair som..

HP Industry Perspectives: Is it too early to be optimistic for 2014?

Hydrocarbon Processing Staff: Romanow, Stephany

The increased availability of natural gas supplies are redefining energy conditions. New natural gas reserves are shifting the order for producing nations. Shale gas reserves, once difficult to extrac..

Phillips 66 to build LPG export terminal in Texas

The proposed terminal would provide 4.4 million bbl/monthof LPG export capacity, the equivalent of eight very large gas carriers (VLGC). It would be located at the site of the company’s existing marine terminal in Freeport and utilize existing Phillips 66 midstream, transportation and storage infrastructure.

US oil, gas M&A activity led by foreign buyers, private equity groups

Foreign buyers announced nine deals in the third quarter of 2013, which contributed $2.8 billion or 17% of total deal value, vs. four deals valued at $4 billion during the same period last year. On a sequential basis from the second quarter, the number of total deals increased 800% from just one foreign deal.