In my time at Shell so far I have been based at Port Dickson Refinery. In my first role I looked after the movement of feedstocks, by-products and products within the refinery. This involved providing technological support on hydrocarbon management, monitoring of blending operations to ensure product quality and I was responsible for all design issues for associated equipment. I also had to look after a lot of tank farms and de-bottleneck the existing facilities - for example, trying to speed up the loading of a ship by increasing the flow rate. That has a real commercial impact because the slower the loading or offloading the longer a ship is at the jetty and the higher the demurrage costs. Another important part of that role was ensuring correct quality products were delivered to the customer. If the wrong quality materials were produced I had to check tank space and see if the off-grade could be re-processed to the correct quality. I also talked with schedulers about selling it to other customers who might want different quality materials. What I learned in my first role has helped me a great deal in my current one. I now look after the planning models for the refinery, monitoring the yields and properties of crude oil being processed. This data enables me to tune the models and predict more closely the quantities of different products and their properties being produced. Which is crucial to optimising the refineries margin. I hand that data to the refinery economist and the planners who looks at the costs involved. What I learned in the first job helped a great deal in my current role. The two jobs complemented each other very well.
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