A volatile grid in Africa can cause problems for refineries, especially when their own sources of power begin to fail. With no power to continue or enough to even restart production, it can be costly.
The customer on this occasion is a refiner of diesel and kerosine fuels, producing roughly 1.2m tonnes per year. With the refinery situated in a remote location of Senegal with extremely unreliable grid, they had been reliant on their own power plant. With this plant now ageing and also becoming unreliable, they were faced with increasing maintenance costs as well as decreasing efficiency. With the plant suffering more power outages – it was now also limiting their production capacity with parts of production being stopped or worse, entire production shutdowns.
One alternative was to get power from the grid. Unfortunately for the customer the grid was still unreliable. As refineries consume huge amounts of power to enable production to continue or be restarted, they were simply were not able to get enough power from the grid to safeguard production.
Frustrated with power gaps resulting in production loss, the refinery contacted Aggreko for a solution to give them time to assess their options including purchasing a new power plant.
In January 2019 we conducted a scoping survey of the refinery, taking into account their entire operation and reviewing all their pain points in the production line. Based on this we made a recommendation, advising them on the best plan of action for the refinery that would ensure 100% uptime and full power availability.