A Special Report for the Refining Industry
"Repeatable Success: Capturing and Utilizing Best Practices in Your Projects"
by Dean Edmundson, Market Manager, Primavera Systems, Inc. and David Frinsco, Operation Manager, The Turnaround Management Company
Introduction
The refining industry as a whole is market driven. Refining and petrochemical plants typically work at peak capacity to satisfy demand, especially when demand is high or raw supplies are low. Supply and demand for petrochemicals is fueled by a number of circumstances and factors: weather and seasonal activities can accelerate demand, for example, while environmental and political climates can drive supplies down. Often running at about 95 percent capacity,1 refining production units are continuously challenged to increase up-time to reduce unit production costs.
Organizational profitability is very tightly aligned to a unit or plant achieving its target capacity. A decrease in capacity as little as 1-2 percent can be catastrophic to an organization’s profits. Because production delays or stoppages due to unexpected equipment failure is not acceptable, maintenance plans are developed for each unit to ensure equipment reliability. Unit by unit, systems are routinely refurbished, or “turned around.” Turnarounds are commonly scheduled during those times when production units have to be shutdown because of scheduled maintenance, insurance inspection, testing or certification.
Historically, processing plants are taken down one unit at a time in a controlled sequence that is influenced by production needs and available time. Each unit would be taken off-line, restored and brought back on-line – according to the availability of the schedule. Turnarounds themselves also can be interrupted by their own set of circumstances, such as plant accidents, equipment breakdowns and vendor delays. In this manner, cost overruns of 40 percent and three-week schedule slippages are common.
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