Monitoring corrosion risk provides early warnings to process conditions that may harm plant assets, allowing for better and faster mitigation responses. At the same time, it provides valuable data to optimize process parameters and support feedstock management.
Ensuring that a refinery is flexible enough to accommodate a variety of discounted crudes and adjust production to meet critical customer commitments sometimes feels like walking a tightrope with just the right balance between the financial benefit these crudes offer...
For refiners, opportunity crude is crude oil available on the spot market that are typically much lower cost than crude oil received under long-term contracts. In a Hydrocarbon Engineering article, Finding the Sweet Spot, Emerson's Meha Jha and Julie Valentine...
Opportunity crudes provide refiners with lower feedstock costs, but they must be carefully characterized and blended with other crudes to avoid problems during the refining process. These opportunity crudes are typically discounted from typical crudes because of the...
Crude oil from shale producing regions, also known as tight oils, are opportunity crudes for refineries. These differ from the traditional sources of crude oil from large reservoirs in their widely varying properties. These properties include specific gravity, sulfur...
A recent Hydrocarbon Processing article highlighted the changing financial picture for refiners over the past 24 months: Those margins collapsed this year in a global fuel supply glut, providing an incentive for refiners to undertake the shutdowns necessary for...
An Environmental Leader article, How Data Analytics is Changing the Oil & Gas Industry, highlights challenges in refining opportunity crudes: Opportunity crudes, such as heavy oil produced from the Canadian oil sands, and light tight oils produced by hydraulic...
The abundance of discounted crude oil, or opportunity crudes, as they are known in refinery parlance, has shifted refinery operators' mindsets over the past few years. In a Hydrocarbon Engineering article, Equip for Opportunity Crudes, Emerson's Marcelo Carugo and Tim...
We've discussed in earlier posts how opportunity crudes, while reducing feedstock costs, increase the complexity of operating a refinery. At a monthly meeting of the South Texas section of the AIChE, Emerson's Tim Olsen presented The New World of Opportunity Crudes....
The complexity in crude oil refining has grown due to many factors including mix of crude oil feedstocks, government regulations, and increasingly global customer base for refined product. In a Hydrocarbon Processing article, Improve refinery flexibility and...
Recently, we highlighted a recorded webinar on the use of online analyzers in refinery blending operations. The presenters, Emerson's Patrick Truesdale and Topnir Systems' Didier Lambert, also recently wrote a Processing Shale Feedstocks article, Three steps to...
Additional sources of oil, such as shale oil, coming into the market can pose challenges for refiners. The challenge comes from mixing these "opportunity crudes" with other types of crude oil that may have very different physical properties. As a Digital Refining...
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The opinions expressed here are the personal opinions of the authors. Content published here is not read or approved by Emerson before it is posted and does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Emerson.