Refining Processes Handbook
Filled with handy process flow diagrams, this comprehensive reference covers the technologies and operations of petroleum refineries and provides material on operating a jointly owned and operated refinery.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Refining Processes Handbook
Chapter Eighteen: Shipping Inventory Forecasts
To plan shipment of products and to schedule such shipments, the marketing department needs to know estimates of each product group s production rate and the inventory available for shipping. This information is required several weeks in advance of the actual shipment, for product sale and chartering vessels to transport products. Also, it is important to maintain the inventory level of each product group within the ullage available to the group in the refinery tankage. This is done by timely transport of products from the refinery tanks. Failure of timely off-take can cause a crisis situation in the refinery, forcing cutdown of crude throughput, shutdown or feed reduction in some downstream units, or dumping distillates into fuel oil.
To provide the marketing department with an accurate inventory forecast of all product groups, every week, the refinery estimates the production rate of each product group and uses these to revise the inventory forecasts for the remaining period of the month
WEEKLY PRODUCTION ESTIMATES
These estimates are done with a spreadsheet refinery model. Here various parameters, such as unit operating modes and blend components, can be controlled more closely than in a linear programming (LP) model, which may require a major modeling effort to reflect the actual refinery situations. The information on the feed rates, operation modes of the units, product blending, and tank inventory levels can be constantly updated, and thus these hand estimates are more realistic than the LP solutions, which are price driven.
Every week the product requirements are revised...
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