Package keeps track of refinery movements

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Feb 14, 2006

Visa-OM is a new operational excellence package that tracks and manages the movements of crude oil and other intermediate and finished product liquids across refineries and petrochemical plants.

Yokogawa Marex has a new operational excellence package for the oil and gas industry, Visa-OM.

To meet the demand from refinery operators for an easy to use operational system that provides tank farm and refinery offsite oil management functionality, Yokogawa Marex has developed Visa-OM, which tracks and manages the movements of crude oil and other intermediate and finished product liquids across refineries and petrochemical plants.

It can be implemented in refineries with high or low levels of automation, making it particularly attractive for upgrading older refineries.

Visa-OM is a powerful model-based software tool that incorporates mass balancing techniques, raw measurements and other data to analyse the information in terms of movements of refinery material.

Integrated within Visa-OM are the Exaquantum plant information management system (PIMS) and the Visa model-based suite of advanced value-added operational excellence applications.

Visa-OM keeps track of material compositions and properties of oil products.

An additional benefit is superior control of a movement of product between tanks and/or plants - in particular mass balance/data reconciliation techniques which help to dramatically reduce the number of unmeasured movements by resolving multiple simultaneous flows in and out of individual tanks.

It also enables refinery management to monitor losses, which can cost hundred of thousands of dollars per year.

Environmental safety is improved - helping to prevent the overfilling of tanks.

Three key Visa-OM operational tools are tank movement ranking, stock accounting and advanced tank level and movement alarms.

The tank ranking report tells operators at a glance the ranking of tanks movements to be dealt with; when they have to start and stop pumps, shut off values and in which order.

The stock accounting function provides a daily report on levels of refinery stock with volume correction factors and related calculations.

Visa-OM provides a complete exception analysis which accounts for differences in tank masses between recorded and measured stock amounts.

The advanced alarm system warms operators of unexpected or unusual behaviour.

For example if a tank begins to fill or empty when there is no movement defined for it, Visa-OM will alert the operator.

Visa-OM was developed in response to demand from Shell Australia which made the decision in 2004 to replace its 15 year old, locally developed oil movements system running in its two Australian refineries at Geelong in Victoria and Clyde in New South Wales.

An existing customer of Yokogawa, Shell required a model-based application which incorporated the benefits of the existing Exaquantum plant information management system (PIMS) and the Visa model-based suite of advanced value-added applications.

John McGuire, Shell Clyde and Geelong's Special Projects Manager, identified what he believed to be the key to the success of the project: "Oil movements projects have traditionally been complex and involved, with a great deal of custom engineering effort required".

"This new approach is a more straightforward implementation because of the largely configurable capabilities of Exaquantum and Visa applications".

Nigel Bowden, Yokogawa Marex Managing Director adds: "Visa-OM provides the long-awaited step-change in the science of tank farm management".

"Excellence flows only from cutting-edge innovation".

"That is what we have with Visa-OM".