Refinery maintenance

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Tube face of a vertical combined feed exchanger – often called a Texas Tower (Photo courtesy of Tubetech).

A critical aspect in petrochemical industry is plant maintenance. Petrochemicals Middle East investigates in the issue.

Every business owner wants to increase production whilst reducing expenditure and within the oil, gas, petrochemical and energy industries an additional desire – or should we say necessity – is the reduction of CO₂ emissions.

Within oil refineries, maintenance is about avoiding emergency critical path situations. It is about identifying problems before they become cause for concern and getting the large, difficult tasks finished so that shutdowns can be shortened. Often these problems are cleaning and inspection related.

“Maintenance is a pretty wide concept and normally consists of two types of maintenance: proactive and reactive,” says Johan Claassen, business development manager, PlantWeb services, asset optimisation group at Emerson.

Proactive maintenance is a maintenance strategy for stabilising the reliability of a refinery. Its central theme involves directing corrective actions aimed at root causes of failure, not active failure symptoms, faults, or machine wear.

Reactive maintenance is a form of maintenance in which equipment and facilities are repaired only in response to a breakdown or a fault. Because of the potential for loss of production, reactive maintenance is at odds with just-in-time production. “People call it fire fighting maintenance and it occurs only when there is breakdown,” says Claassen.

“People want to move from the reactive maintenance to proactive maintenance to avoid loss of money,” he adds.

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