The Becht Team
Ralph C. Norton
Refinery Process Operations
Ralph C. Norton has over 45 years’ experience working for UOP assisting clients to operate their oil refinery process units efficiently and safely. His career path included 10 years in Field Operating Services doing new unit commissioning and 35 years in District Services doing point of contact service for numerous domestic and foreign refineries. He attained the grade of UOP Technical Fellow. His experience includes:
- Oil refinery process unit commissioning, optimization, and support, including unit checkout, procedure preparation, engineer and operator training, unit start up, unit optimization, unit trouble shooting, catalyst loadings, catalyst regenerations, long-term mentoring, turnaround planning, and accident investigations.
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- Processes worked on include crude atmospheric and vacuum distillation; saturate and unsaturated gas plants; fixed bed, cyclic, and continuous catalytic regenerated (CCR) naphtha reforming units; fluidized bed catalytic cracking (FCC) units; resid fluid cat cracking (RFCC) units; hydrotreaters processing all feeds from LPG to atmospheric residuum; hydrocrackers; isomerization units (all three catalyst types); solvent deasphalting units; HF and sulfuric acid alkylation units; mercaptan oxidation and extraction units; amine treating units; green jet and diesel producing units; and aromatic extraction units.
- Coordinated the commissioning of a Green Jet unit. This is an emerging technology that converts plant and animal derived oils, fats, and greases into a green drop-in substitute for crude oil derived diesel oil and jet fuel.
- Taught the technology and operations course for operators, engineers, and managers for numerous refinery technologies. These ranged from regeneration procedure training for a 1,500 BPD platformer to technology and procedure training for engineers at new 560,000 BPD crude oil distillation unit being constructed.
- Did a field study of an early vintage naphtha reforming unit to determine the root cause of a failure to meet yield and cycle time expectations
- Participated as a member of several accident investigation teams in FCC, HF alkylation, naphtha reforming, and hydrotreating units.
- Provided field support for numerous planned and unplanned unit and refinery wide turnarounds.
- Assisted a refiner after a political settlement allowed the restart of a battle-damaged refinery to determine the best path to conduct repairs, staff training, and prepare restart procedures for the refinery.
Mr. Norton holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering, with Honors from the University of California, Berkley, CA.
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Maureen Brody
Training Lead – Private Training & Curriculum Development, Becht Learning & Development Division
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Hearl Mead, Jr
Refining Metallurgical & Corrosion Engineer & Asset Integrity Management Expert
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Paul Southerland
Project Manager - Fixed Equipment, Mechanical Integrity, and Reliability Engineering
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