This facility is controlled by PdVSA (the Venezu¬elan
national oil company) in a joint venture with Chevron.
It begins with the tar-like feedstock at 7.5 °API,
and turns it into 26 °API synthetic crude. The plant
first started operation in 2003 as Petrolera Ameriven,
and began delivering product in January, 2004. By the
middle of that year, it achieved normal production,
with capacity rated at 248,000 barrels per day with
1,500 employees.
As in any oil
processing facility, reliability is paramount, and with 5,000
instruments commu¬nicating with the DCS, eliminating problems
from erratic devices was key. To achieve that, Petropiar added
Emerson’s AMS Device Manager platform to its Honeywell
DCS. This system uses HART technology to communicate intelligent
device diag¬nostic information from instruments and actuators
throughout the plant.
“Since our plant went on line in 2004, HART technology
has opened a door of opportunity to the reliability community,”
says Mariela Leon, Petropiar instrumentation reliability leader.
“We were able to optimize our work process creating
a reduction of maintenance costs which led to a 60% reduction
of lost profit opportunities (LPO) caused by instru¬mentation
faults. Eliminating bad actors and having the ability to reduce
random failure has resulted in a reported reduction of LPO
on the order of $70 million in two years.”
Based on such successes, the HART Communi¬cation Foundation
was happy to make its selection for 2008. “Petropiar
is a perfect example of how the power of HART can be used
to lower cost, improve plant availability and contribute to
keeping your plant competitive,” says HCF executive
director Ron Helson. “We congratulate Petropiar for
their foresight, planning and vision in building a plant infrastructure
that allowed the use of the intelligent capabilities of HART-enabled
instrumentation,”
Petropiar’s maintenance group found that their efforts
using HART made the plant startup go much smoother, as instrumentation
performance and cali¬bration problems had been sought
out and correct¬ed before it went on line. As a result,
there were no failures attributed to instrumentation reported
dur¬ing the startup period. Their bad actors had already
been identified and corrected, eliminating 95% of related
problems.
Since startup, this preventive method has con¬tinued.
Calibration tasks are thoroughly defined, with routes and
schedules laid out for the entire universe of instrumentation.
This emphasis on pre¬dictive maintenance allows them to
attend to only the items that really need attention, resulting
in a 10% increase in effective personnel “wrench time.”
This has allowed the plant to operate with a staff of only
five reliability engineers and 12 instrument technicians and
still stay ahead of most problems.
Replacing dumb sensors
These experiences have caused the reliabil¬ity team to
look for other opportunities where HART has not already been
put to work. There are still a small population of installed
devices that are not HART capable, but these will be upgraded.
All new instruments and process ana¬lyzers must be HART
compliant.
Moreover, all systems have not yet been inte¬grated into
the AMS, but this is also underway. Some parts of the safety
instrumented system (SIS), some PLC driven subsystems, and
the fire and gas (F&G) detection system are still being
incorporated into the larger asset management network.
One example of this increased reliability relates to valve
positioners. “HART technology was used to pinpoint a
bad valve positioner which provided the justification to change
or add positioners to 400 valves,” says Livia Lefebre,
reliability superinten¬dent. “We also demonstrated
the partial valve stroke application to management who then
approved its use, significantly increasing the time between
required shutdowns.”
HART technology is also used at the oil produc¬tion site
that feeds Petropiar, and by the end of 2008 the two systems
will be interconnected. This will allow the reliability engineers
at the upgrader to analyze what’s happening upstream
as well.
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