Oil refinery becomes Hart Plant of the Year

The Hart Communication Foundation has selected the PDVSA Petropiar oil refinery in Mejorador Jose, Barcelona, Venezuela, as recipient of the 2008 Hart Plant of the Year award.

The award is given annually to recognise the people, companies and plant sites around the globe that are using the advanced capabilities of Hart Communication in real-time applications to improve operations, lower costs and increase availability.

The Petropiar (formerly Petrolera Ameriven) facility, which employs 1,500 people, processes synthetic crude from the Orinoco basin at the rate of 248,000 barrels per day.

The Hart communication protocol is included in 5,000 instruments associated with the plant's control system.

The company's main goal was to implement predictive device diagnostics on all instrumentation.

As a result, in the first four years in operation, Petropiar realised a reduction in pre-commissioning and commissioning time, improved process and device documentation, and reduced loop check time by 60 per cent.

The use of Hart technology also allowed a flawless startup without a single failure attributed to instrumentation during this period, and the facility was able to eliminate 95 per cent of bad actors reported by its asset management application.

Mariela Leon, Petropiar instrumentation reliability leader, said: 'Using Hart, we were able to optimise our work process, creating a reduction of maintenance costs which led to a 60 per cent reduction of LPO (lost profit opportunity) caused by instrument faults.

'Eliminating bad actors and having the ability to reduce random failure has resulted in a reported reduction of LPO in the order of USD70m in two years.' Livia Lefebre, Petropiar reliability superintendent, added: 'Hart technology was initially used to pinpoint a bad valve positioner, which provided the justification to change or add positioners to 400 valves.

'We demonstrated the partial valve stroke application to management, who then approved its use - which significantly increased the time between required shut downs.' According to Leon and Lefebre, the company's engineering teams also found Hart technology useful with SIL (safety integrity level) determination and, because they spent maintenance time only on devices with a problem, they were able to create two work shifts using the same manpower regularly used on a single shift.

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