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In the oil and gas industry, fired heater fuel consumption represents the largest percent of energy costs as it consumes large amount of fuel to produce the necessary heat duty. Fired heaters are also one of the sources of greenhouse gases which recently have been focused on. In recent years, initiatives related to greenhouse gases reduction have evolved which require close monitoring of utility consumption and subsequently optimization. This requirement changes the ways of working, which includes the need to monitor thermal efficiency of fired heaters. Thermal efficiency of fired heaters is usually monitored manually by plant engineers to optimize fuel gas consumption at the fired heaters, including boilers and furnaces. This calculation is usually done using legacy spreadsheets for month-end reporting and it provides limited actionable insights for furnace operation fine tuning and maintenance. A furnace analytics program was developed to allow automatic calculations, reporting and immediate actionable insights. This program uses real time data supported by rigorous simulation model to provide instant and accurate furnace performance calculations to allow for optimum furnace operation. Real-time equipment efficiency will eventually result in fuel gas consumption savings. The hybrid furnace modelling and analytics has the capability to provide precise prescriptive solution for effective troubleshooting and avoid further equipment deterioration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In any chemical process industry, the implementation of flare system involves a significant amount of investment in terms of capital cost. There is a significant opportunity to optimize the flare design by applying High-Integrity Protection System (HIPS). HIPS has been widely used as one of mitigation strategies in reducing the flare capacity for new and existing plant as this being allowed by API Std 521. For a new refinery complex, HIPS was introduced in a total of five (5) column reboilers in order to safely reduce the acid gas flare design capacity. Based on preliminary analysis, partial power failure scenario had been identified as the governing scenario for the acid gas flare design capacity. In this use case, HIPS will mitigate any potential overpressure scenario by cutting off the steam supply to the distillation column reboilers. However, it is important to consider the transient relief from the columns to the acid gas flare system considering this may affect the design capacity of the flare. The total transient relief rate estimated from dynamic simulation accounts for the amount of vapor generated due to residual heat from the reboiler after HIPS valves were closed and loss of reflux to the distillation column. The outcome of the model were time-series plots, detailing out the individual and total relieves of all the distillation columns. This paper presents a case study on relief load calculation with HIPS installation and consideration of transient effect for five columns before activation of HIPS together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]