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AM-02-65 ANSWERING THE BIG TURNAROUND QUESTION

Charles Etter, James Thompson, Equistar Chemicals, LP

Format:
Electronic (digital download/no shipping)

Associate Member, International Member, Petrochemical Member, Refining Member - $0.00
Government, NonMember - $25.00

Description:

“Can we delay (or accelerate) the Turnaround six months?” Plant management is often asked this type of question in the face of rising or falling margins yet typically must rely on experience, gut feel, problem specific monitoring and/or reams of unstructured reliability data to respond. Similarly, turnaround managers and others charged with effectively planning and executing outages are often faced with an uphill battle when attempting to answer this question. Many of these decisions are logical and have a positive financial result for the company. However, it often seems that such decisions are heavily influenced by uncertain and inexact market predictions or project economics and do not fully take into account all the relevant cost factors. This paper describes a risk-based model developed by Lyondell/Equistar to assist with turnaround timing decisions. The model, which will be illustrated with a case study, is based on four factors: 1) the probabilistic cost of failure due to an unplanned outage, 2) planning and execution costs, 3) life cycle costs, and 4) business environment impacts. A focus of this paper will be the presentation of a risk-based methodology for quantifying the probability and cost of an unplanned outage over time.

Product Details:

Product ID: AM-02-65
Publication Year: 2002