Eliminating equipment failure and reducing costs during a turnaround

All refineries need to carry out regular maintenance and upgrades to ensure the safety of staff and to keep equipment operating efficiently. In the past, the refinery had encountered issues with equipment failures during these turnarounds, which led to increased costs and delays to the schedule and ultimately affected productivity and profitability.

So, they asked Aggreko to support them with complete 24/7 remote monitoring to reduce the risk of equipment failure. They also wanted to collect data from all the equipment to allow them to right size for the future and ensure they always had the right amount of power in the right location.

We used Aggreko Remote Monitoring (ARM) to connect all the equipment and keep track of it for the full 46-day turnaround at our Remote Operations Center (ROC). The site was fully mapped out and spare parts were put on standby so that any alerts could be resolved before equipment failed.

The equipment included 24 tier 4 final generators, five batteries, one compressor, ten electrical distribution panels, three MPZs, two air conditioners, four chillers, and one cooling tower. The ROC captured 24/7 data from all the equipment so it could report on how and where it was being used and if it could be reduced for future turnarounds to save costs. Most importantly, this included data on how much power was being provided by each generator to each of the 10 substations at the site.

The hybrid batteries provided all the necessary power for 82% of the time. This led to:

• Over 10,000 less gallons of diesel used
• NOX emissions reduced by 7.45 tons
• CO emissions reduced by 1.69 tons
• 77 fewer refuelling instances

Throughout the turnaround, our technicians addressed 40 separate alarm incidents and ensured there was no equipment failure at any time. The automatic alerting and advanced planning meant that technicians could quickly locate the piece of equipment that had generated the alert and fix it before it failed.

During previous turnarounds, the customer was using 300 kW generators at each substation to provide power but the data collected showed that they only needed to use generators providing between 100 kW and 150 kW of power at each substation. This will allow them to reduce their equipment and fuel costs by approximately $8,000 and increase reliability for future turnarounds. The data also showed that the number and size of batteries used could be consolidated in the future, leading to savings of over $20,000.