Tank movement upgrade

Shell's two Australian refineries, at Geelong in Victoria and Clyde in NSW, have each awarded Yokogawa Australia a contract to supply them with modern, state-of-the-art oil movements and tank information systems. The systems will replace proprietary in-house technology which has been in use for twenty years.

In a refinery tank farm, raw materials, intermediate products and final products are stored prior to being used in the refinery or shipped to market. Product movements between tanks, process units, and input and output terminals are continually occurring as part of the normal refinery business and process flow. Inventory tracking and balancing is vitally important to the profitability of the refineries, and losses must be kept to a minimum.

Yokogawa will provide an inventory tracking and management system, which is based on the Yokogawa Exaquantum process information management system and Visa value-added application extensions. The system will display and store tank inventory information; manage and track material movements between tanks and process or terminal nodes; store movement transactional records; perform mass balances with reconciliation; calculate and propagate component mixtures; interface with other business systems; enable comprehensive reporting facilities; and provide a detailed human interface for operational, engineering and management personnel.

John McGuire, Clyde and Geelong's special projects manager, has commented, "Oil movements projects have traditionally been complex and involved, with a great deal of custom engineering effort required. With this Yokogawa approach, we anticipate a more straightforward implementation because of the largely configurable Exaquantum and Visa Applications used by Yokogawa."

Trevor Briggs, managing director of Yokogawa Australia, comments, "Yokogawa has been involved in oil movements systems for many years. We look forward to applying this extensive level of expertise in this future direction, an applied system which is independent of the DCS but with the capability of being able to interact with the DCS to effect a complete oil movements supervisory solution."

The projects will be managed and engineered by Yokogawa Australia with technical and development support from Yokogawa Marex in the UK. Yokogawa Electric Corporation in Tokyo will provide corporate and application support.

Shell Australia has formed a project team to interface with the Yokogawa team, comprising representatives from both refineries, from Shell Australia head office, and Shell Global Solutions in The Hague.