25 November 2020

WEBINARS ON REFINING: PROCESS SAFETY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM AND EXCHANGE OF BEST PRACTICES IN THE OPERATION OF DESALINATORS

  • On November 18, an internal training took place for Petroperú professionals on the practices that make a refinery safe and, for this, the Process Safety Management System was taken as a basis. The activity was led by the ARPEL Downstream Manager, Ricardo Buyatti.

    Throughout history the issue of security has always been present, so much so that 2100 years BC, the first mention appears in the Hammurabi code - if a builder builds the house and it collapses and kills the owner's son, the architect's son must die - but with the industrial revolution and the development of large machines that they did not incorporate protection for people, is that the first standards of safety at work are dictated that covered topics such as ventilation, lighting, reduction of hours, protection systems in the machinery and some compensation for the injured worker, he reflected before an audience of more than 300 professionals from the ARPEL member company.

    He added that in the twentieth century, what we call industrial safety has a great momentum, encompassing both industrial incidents and human accidents. As a consequence of large industrial accidents, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OHSA), the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS), and the CSB organization decided to develop a management system that could detect the hazards inherent in the processes and carry out risk analysis to mitigate or contain the hazard detected.

    The result is the Process Safety Management System, which has four fundamental supports: Commitment to process safety; Understand dangers and risks; Manage risk, and Learn from experience.

    "The effectiveness of a management system depends on the commitment of the entire organization," Buyatti concluded.

    Meanwhile, on November 24, Buyatti was at the forefront of another virtual meeting dedicated to "Exchange of best practices in the operation of desalination plants and how to mitigate their impact on liquid effluents from refineries." 58 professionals from different refineries in Latin America participated in the webinar: ANCAP, PAN AMERICAN ENERGY, YPF, AXION, TRAFIGURA, ENAP, REPSOL, PETROPERÚ, PETROECUADOR and ECOPETROL.

    Crudes from both mature fields and shale oil come with a high content of so-called filterable solids; these solids generate interfaces in desalters that affect their operation in different ways, the most important manifestation of which is the high crude oil content in the purge of the refinery's liquid effluent system.

    In the presentations made by professionals from ANCAP and YPF, they exposed the difficulties and the solutions that help to mitigate the problems that mainly manifest themselves in the fouling of the heat exchange system, the formation of carbon in the furnace tubes, and corrosion at the top of the distillation tower and the large amount of slop generation, which represents an extra cost in the operation of the refineries.

    "The solutions go through operational practices that arise from experiences, the use of chemical products, investments in new facilities, laboratory instruments, software application for data analysis, among others," said Buyatti.

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