Surviving the downturn

The global economic downturn has exacerbated the challenges facing refiners. It has created short-term demand dislocation at a time when new refinery capacity is set to come on-stream. Furthermore, in these illiquid times, refiners are short of cash and securing financing for new projects can be very difficult.

Nevertheless, Süleyman Özmen, General Manager, Refining and Chemical Licensing, Shell Global Solutions International BV, counsels that enterprises should not sit back and do nothing. "Use this as an opportunity to improve your performance. What better incentive is there than a crisis?" he says. "We do not know the duration or the depth of this downturn, but one day it will be over and you will have missed the opportunity to drive improvement."

Several constrained-capital-expenditure technology solutions provide valuable options for increasing margins and increasing capacity at the next turnaround, Özmen explains. For instance, high-vacuum distillation unit simulations show that refiners could help to increase their yield of hydrocracked diesel through converting to deepflash high-vacuum operation and thus possibly raise their margins by up to $2 million a year.

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