Automation of tank farm systems
Automation helps to streamline operations as well as supply and demand
planning, sales orders and inventory in tank management
JIJNASA PANIGRAHI and ARUN KUMAR S
Helium Consulting
R
efinery tank farms are the
largest units in terms of
numbers of plant items in
any refinery. Refineries handle
a huge stock of crude oil and
product inventories, which
invariably involves high capital
investment. Accurate inventory
is critical to terminal operations
and to reconciling hydrocar-
bons within the plant.
However, the complex and
dynamic nature of the opera-
tion can make it difficult to
pinpoint current tank levels or
predict a refinery’s future
inventory. This can result in
increased operational expense
to fulfill existing commitments
and an inability to execute
future orders. This article
focuses on new horizons in the
field of automation in tank
farm management systems and
also highlights the challenges
arising.
Challenges in refineries
Refineries continuously strive
to better their standards and
uphold effective best practices
in the areas of operation,
accounting, loss control and
overall hydrocarbon manage-
ment to deliver significant cost
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savings and reduce their envi-
ronmental impact. To improve
their hydrocarbon manage-
ment, refineries should
continuously evaluate their
perception of the principles
and effects of the measurement
of oil movement and storage to
understand the errors involved.
This should help them towards
better management of hydro-
carbon inventory.
Refiners are under pressure
to increase refining margin by
reducing inventory, optimising
crude mix and reducing prod-
uct quality giveaway at the
same time as producing more
grades to tighter product and
environmental specifications.
Economic benefits result from
improved planning and sched-
uling, coupled with tighter
control and increased opera-
tional assurance and flexibility.
Refinery tank operations
involve a list of tasks and oil
movements like crude receipt
and storage, process unit feeds
and crude blending, process
unit rundowns, intermediate
product storage, component
storage, blended product stor-
age and dispatch through
ships, pipeline, road trucks and
rail wagons. Significant
improvement in the operation
and management of the
off-sites can be achieved
through refinery automation.
The main challenges faced
are:
• Executing an effective daily
reconciliation of oil movements
• Handling huge data collec-
tion and manual entry
• Quantification of individual
unit-wise loss recorded
• Unaccountable loss due to
errors
• Eliminating property givea-
way in product blending
• Reconciliation of estimated
production data with actual
data from the refinery
• Optimum production plan-
ning objectives.
Automation is the solution
Automation of oil movement
and storage and control system
helps to:
• Reduce operating cost
• Optimise blending
• Provide better planning by
opening up opportunities for
optimisation in feedstock
selection
• Reduce inventory
• Reduce routing error
PTQ Q3 2016 1

Business
level Planning and scheduling
Yield accounting
Operations
level
Blend optimiser
Field
level
Tank 2
Tank 1
Figure 1 Typical map of integrated automation systems in the refinery
• Provide incident and slop
analysis.
Oil movement and storage
automation enables all tank
farm and loading bay processes
to be managed and automated
with maximum consistency
and according to standards.
This can be done on three
levels:
• Field: automation at the field
device level
• Operations: automation at
the management execution
system (MES) level
• Business: closing the loop by
integrating oil accounting into
the enterprise systems (ERP).
This would allow the refin-
ery to monitor all its automated
processes and ensure rapid
identification of problems as
well as savings in both time
and money. Many companies
have already implemented
filed automation and enterprise
ERP systems that are capable
of handling the first and third
levels. In this article, we are
discussing the second level, the
operations level (see Figure 1).
Data gathering, reconcilia-
2 PTQ Q3 2016
ERP
Oil accounting
Historian LIMS
Automatic tank
Tank 4 gauging
Tank 3
tion, yield accounting or oil
accounting, and refinery infor-
mation reporting systems are
essential in automating refinery
oil movement and storage
systems. Automation in oil
movement and storage calls for
a detailed definition of
complete system integration for
effective functioning of the
automated system. Automated
oil movement and storage
might include a complex busi-
ness procedure involving
comprehensive daily analysis
of all flows, oil movement data,
lab data and inventory data.
Normally, these different data
types are from different
sources, and integration of all
these data into a single system
as an input for an oil move-
ment and storage business
process is an absolute
necessity.
MES helps in tracking and
optimising operations with
rapid, accurate and transparent
movement of data in real time.
It helps in better understanding
how tank operations are being
performed in real time. This
would have a positive impact
on operations and business, as
it would help in timely and
informed decision making
about inventory and production
performance.
Data historian
Every refinery generates signif-
icant volumes of data but
encounters difficulty in lever-
aging information effectively
without a good MES layer. A
data historian makes it easy for
the refinery to handle large
amounts of data generated by
the plant and other areas of
operation. It ensures that
historical data is readily availa-
ble to users for analysis. In this
case, it ensures that data is
readily available for other
systems and applications for
oil movement and storage. For
example, for movement and
yield calculation, flows of
streams and their respective
temperatures and pressures are
normally obtained from a refin-
ery historian, and inventory
data is obtained from the tank
gauging system. MES is the
foundation for integrating and
connecting plant control
systems and the shop floor
with business systems.
Tank operation
The key to refinery profitability
is being able to plan, schedule
and optimise operations based
on real-time information with
feedback on what is currently
happening and what has actu-
ally been done, in order to
regulate refinery operations:
• Starting, stopping and track-
ing of all movements
• Improved automation
sequences, thereby increasing
operator efficiency and reduc-
ing contamination of products
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• Scheduling automation of oil
movements
• Reporting and monitoring of Yield accounting
actual quantities
Process units
• Improved oil loss accounting,
using better quality real-time
data for material balancing
• Automated workflows to Movements Movements

support production processes

Crude receipts Product
• Automated data collection Component Intermediate shipments
from tank and related auxiliary
equipment and sensors Boundary-layer reconciliation
• Management and tracking of
material within work centres Figure 2 High level view of the components of oil and product movement in
and across work centres the refinery
• Generation of tank area
documentation and manage-
ment reporting on fuel and Component Component Component Planning and
losses. inventory qualities cost scheduling

Automation of tank opera-

tion involves oil movement
planning, oil movement order
management, oil movement
line-up and oil movement
order monitoring and report-
ing. This allows the planner/
scheduler to import, create,
modify and monitor oil move-
ment orders (see Figure 2).
Following approval, the oper-
ator executes an oil movement
order. This monitors the
progress of the oil movement,
terminates the movement when
it is complete, then starts the
next order. A major advantage
is that the destination proper-
ties are calculated based on the
tank properties and the source
properties, and are updated by
laboratory results from the
LIMS system interface. The
operators also have to dispatch
the product, and these oil
movements are dependent on
the blend order being
completed and the product
quality being certified.
Blending optimisation
The final component in the
tank tracking and optimisation
Blend recipe
Blend optimiser
Product
inventory
Blend header
analyser
Blend ratios
Figure 3 Typical blend optimisation flow in the refinery
sequence involves managing Blend optimiser applications
the blending process of various have always been attractive
components both on the crude investments because of their
side as well as on the product benefits; though not always
side. A blend optimisation tool straightforward, these benefits
manages both real-time blend- are almost always quantifiable.
ing and oil movements, and is The key areas where
used by schedulers, technical tangible benefits are realised
services and by operators/ include:
supervisors in the control • Optimised blend recipes and
room. It is designed to opti- reduced product quality
mise the blending operation giveaway
based on component cost and • Reduced margin between
component specification, sales and target product
reduce inventory requirements, specifications.
and maximise valuable product Hence total blend cost is
production (see Figure 3). reduced.

www.digitalrefining.com/article/1001311 PTQ Q3 2016 3

 Oil accounting or yield
accounting
Comprehensive oil accounting
should feature a standard busi-
ness process for data gathering
and validation, as well as
producing an accurate material
balance for the refinery units
and for publishing the required
data. Four successive steps
involved in oil accounting are:
data gathering; identification of
data discrepancy or gross error;
reconciliation; and reporting.
Daily reconciled unit produc-
tion will help the refinery in
reaching commercial decisions,
in price risk management, and
in fuel and loss monitoring and
control with more accuracy
and assurance.
Reporting
An integrated MES for tank
farms and terminals provides
extensive monitoring and
control at the enterprise level
for optimal response in market-
ing and manufacturing,
enabling optimum data trans-
parency and accessibility at the
execution level. It explicitly
represents tank terminal opera-
tions as a graphical workflow
and effectively synchronises,
coordinates, analyses and opti-
4 PTQ Q3 2016
mises the entire tank terminal,
thus enabling various opera-
tions to compile and process
large amounts of data into
meaningful reports.
Conclusion
Automation offers a compre-
hensive range of functionalities
for the typical needs of tank
management, to help stream-
line operations and for other
supply and demand planning
as well as sales orders and
inventory management.
Robust and comprehensive
oil accounting is beneficial to
refineries as it can improve
refinery economics in terms of
optimised planning and sched-
uling. The most important
benefit that oil accounting
systems provide is the direct
impact of reduced losses.
From the refinery manage-
ment’s point of view, direct
benefits that can be achieved at
the operational level include:
higher productivity through
better asset utilisation, shorter
waiting times, and fewer errors
caused by manual operation;
and better control through
improved distributed visibility
of centralised information on
all terminal operations (both
real-time and historical).
Automation also offers indi-
rect benefits, not necessarily
commercial. It provides recon-
ciled and accurate production
figures that can be used by
different business processes
within a refinery for improved
operational management and
decision making.
Jijnasa Panigrahi heads the Technical
Services & Consulting group with
Helium Consulting, Pune, India, and
specialises in process modelling,
production and technical services. She
holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical
engineering from Indira Gandhi Institute
of Technology (IGIT) Orissa.
Arun Kumar S is Technical Lead with
Helium Consulting Private Limited, Pune,
India. He has eight years of experience
in refinery operation and MES. He has
vast experience in the area of refinery
operation, commissioning, and process
software implementation and support.
He holds a bachelor degree in chemical
engineering from St. Josephs College of
Engineering, Tamilnadu.
LINKS
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