Process Safety and Performance Improvement in Oil Refineries Through Active Redundancy and Risk Assessment Method - A Case Study

Safety and performance improvement of oil refineries are of paramount importance as far as plant throughput is concerned. The refineries do have several critical units, one such unit is Hydrocracker Unit (HCU), which is used in petroleum refineries to produce mainly diesel and other middle distillates. Maintenance of specified temperature of these products is a real challenge as far as the safety is concerned. During high throughput, the cooler used for cooling the outgoing products like diesel becomes ineffective, which results in increased diesel temperature, leading to unsafe condition and reduced performance. The critical parts of the cooler will further worsen the situation. The case study presents the excerpts of process safety and performance improvement of a HCU cooling system by installing an additional cooler as an active redundancy to reduce the diesel outlet temperature. An effective risk assessment method, FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) has been carried out to identify the critical units of the cooler unit.