(117c) Impact of Ad Hoc Operability on GHG Emissions and Waste Heat Recovery

Operability of process plants is a major process objective especially in the current oil and gas business environment. Energy supplies are tight and oil and gas producing companies are running their production plants close to its constraints. Process owners have become extremely conscious of their plants operability. Avoiding any process modification that can result in clear benefits from energy savings point of view and emissions reduction but may impact process operability is a word of wisdom. Operability of process plants needs availability of process equipment and such availability in its turn needs good controllability where controllability needs design flexibility and such design flexibility means high level of process switchability. Such smooth switchability from operation mode to another without losing production is a key to oil production companies. Since oil producers nowadays give operability high priority as a process objective; heat integration of process units that may suffer even rare trips is normally avoided regardless. Giving ad hoc operability measures very high priority does not come without cost. This cost might be high and it needs to be known ahead of any ad hoc decisions towards better operability measures. In this paper through an industrial case study we show the cost of an ad hoc operability measure in forms of increased fuel consumption and more GHG emissions.