Future refineries must be digitally connected.

Byline: UROOJ AIJAZ

The oil refining sector is the foundation of people and business livelihoods all across the world. Aiming to become sustainable, networked and integrated with petrochemicals. Many refiners are driven by the never-ending desire to extract more value from every drop of oil, but the route they follow to get there is particular to each refinery and is established by incremental capital investments made over time.

The refinery of the future is evaluated at each level based on how effectively it utilizes six essential resources to seize progress. These six efficiencies assess a refinery's ability to utilize, precious scarce water resources, carbon and hydrogen, the building blocks of hydrocarbons, as well as its level of emissions. The sixth efficiency, effective use of capital, is influenced by these five other efficiencies. In accordance with the refinery's overarching business strategy, all six factors are balanced.

Utility effectiveness measures how effectively energy is used to run the refinery. Water efficiency, which is used to control temperatures in the refinery, is especially important because it is always scarce while we can no longer consider water to be a utility, as water is now a very precious product due to its limited availability and to balance society's requirements for civic, industrial and agricultural purposes.

Due to increased regulations and environmental liabilities, refineries are bound to reduce emissions. To sustain high profitability and ensure funds for future investment, the plant's capital must yield alluring returns. Future refineries must react fast to transforming market conditions, moving from one product to another when profit margins fluctuate, in order to preserve sustained profitability. For instance, the raw material used to make gasoline, naphtha, might be used to make petrochemical feedstock that sells for more money and then returned to producing gasoline when prices drop.

It is the need of time that our future refineries must be digitally connected to a degree that has never been imaginable, and this is perhaps the most important. A refinery may produce millions of data points, but up until now, this information has only been used to track the facility's performance which requires quick transformation from data collection to data utilisation. In just the last three years, new cloud-based connected plant technologies have been developed that can compare plant performance data with a...