Over one hundred thousand floating roofs have been used in hydrocarbon (oil) storage tanks since the 1950s. A majority of these tanks continue to be in service and are critical to meet strategic storage needs. An earlier article in this blog category describes Industry Best Practices for inspection and maintenance of such tanks. View Maintenance […]
The safe operation, maintenance and reliability of roofs in large tanks, does require special considerations in their design, construction and installation practices. Over the past 60 plus years, thousands of tanks with Fixed Roofs with internal Covers, and Floating Roofs, have been used to store Crude Oil and Middle Distillates. Refiners derived significant advantage through […]
Turnarounds (TA) in refining units are executed periodically, on a planned basis, to meet multiple objectives, such as regulatory compliance, process reliability improvement, and equipment inspection and/or repairs. In a competitive business environment, managing TA events in a cost effective manner is a well-recognized challenge. Key Step – Planning Development of a comprehensive Work Scope for […]
Risk Based Work Selection (RBWS) is one of the Best Practices used by refiners in managing safety and reliability of operations for a facility. RBWS enables refiners to optimize the scope, cost and duration of major turnarounds (TA). Optimization of the work scope is accomplished by screening individual TA Work List items, using a risk-based […]
Refrigerated Liquefied Storage Tanks have been used for over 60 years in the industry. A significant number of these tanks store liquefied Propane and Butane, Ethylene and LNG and Ammonia. The stored fluids are at atmospheric pressures with temperatures which range from -45 F to -270 Failures of refrigerated tanks have been quite infrequent over […]
Integrity management of piping systems involves functional testing, inspection and maintenance of components which are identified as “safety critical”. Typically, these component types include control valves, isolation valves, pressure relief valves and instrumentation – but exclude check valves. However, recent incidents involving check valve failures have resulted in fatalities, equipment damage and toxic releases. These […]
Every Refinery whether small or big, isolated or a part of a larger group generally has practices to improve reliability of operations. However, refineries who are known to be world class performers have well defined Reliability Management Systems (RMS) which focus on improving equipment reliability for piping, pressure vessels, rotating equipment, electrical distribution system, instrumentation […]
