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...
Tim Olsen
Answering the Challenges Refiners and Petrochemical Producers Face
The autumn season is officially here in the Northern hemisphere and this season is filled with events and conferences. I'm always amazed when I hear about some of my friends in the industry and automation trade press and their daunting travel schedules through the...
Automation Addresses Opportunity Crudes Refining Challenges
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...
Better Handling Opportunity Crudes in Refineries
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....
Increasing Refinery Flexibility to Handle Wide-Ranging Feedstocks
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...
Position Feedback for Refinery Manually Operated Valves
Sometimes a good discussion occurs among experts in a collaboration application within the Emerson firewall. Today's post is an example. Emerson's Jonas Berge was asking the global community of consultants and interested parties in refining about the manually operated...
Challenges in Refining Tight Oil
If you're like me you may have you wondered why with all the U.S. shale oil production, there are calls to change federal law to allow exports even though the U.S is a large oil importer. The answer comes to me in an excellent Chemical Engineering Progress (CEP)...
Advancing the Cause of Process Automation
As members of the process automation and instrumentation community, it is always great to be recognized for contributions advancing our craft. I wanted to take the opportunity of today's post to congratulate Emerson's Tim Olsen for recognition by the AIChE Fuels and...
A Primer on Refinery Operations
If you're not in the oil refining business the names of the process units, such as cat crackers, can sound quite exotic. Emerson's Tim Olsen, a consultant on the refining industry team, wrote a great AIChE Chemical Engineering Progress article, An Oil Refinery...
Light Tight Oil and Heat Exchanger Fouling
I received an email of a new whitepaper, Heat Exchanger Challenges with Light Tight Crude! written by Emerson's Tim Olsen. Tim is a consultant on our refining industry team and has shared his expertise in numerous refining-related posts here on the blog. The rapid...
Refining and Blending Challenges with Shale Oil
At the recent American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) 2013 Q&A and Technology Forum, Emerson's Tim Olsen had an article in the conference daily publication. You may recall Tim from earlier posts and as the past Chair for the AIChE Fuels and...
Steps to Effective PID Loop Tuning
Sometimes when you read an article about tuning proportional-integral-derivative (PID) loops, you're treated to all the 2nd order differential equations they contain. These can be intimidating, especially if your college calculus classes are many years in the rearview...
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