Today I wanted to give you a feel for some of my individual responsibilities for the next year. Namely, the two areas of the plant that I will be concerned with are the Effluent Treatment Plant (or ETP) and the gas flaring system. If any of you would like more information into how these individual areas of the plant work then post a comment and I can give some detail in a subsequent post.
My role with respect these two areas is to monitor their performance daily and provide feedback through various routes. To concentrate first on the effluent: any water on site - be it produced water associated with the hydrocarbons from the reservoirs, or simply run-off rain water into the drains - likely to be contaminated with oil must be properly cleaned prior to being pumped into the local river. The ETP cleans this water and monitors the environmental performance of the process.
This means that I will look at how much oil-in-water (in both total mass and concentration) terms is pumped back to the river, along with its pH and heavy metals content etc. This information is required and must fall within constraints set out in our Pollution Prevention and Control consent from the local environment agency.
Flaring also must be monitored for environmental purposes, but also for cost issues. For those who don't know, flaring is a pressure control on the system. If for instance the pressure in a vessel containing gas is high, or there is a trip on a gas compressor, then the gas can be routed to a flare where it is combusted. If any of you have ever seen a picture of an offshore oil rig, or an onshore refinery, you may well have noticed large elevated pipes with a flame coming from them: this is a flare. This is a good safety device but obviously as gas products can be sold it is beneficial is non-essential flaring can be reduced. Therefore, flaring events are closely monitored.
So that's some more info on the type of work a process engineer could be involved with on a hydrocarbon site. The next fortnight sees me on several training courses and technical events. Maybe next time I can give some feedback on them.
Well, after 20 years of education - 5 of which saw me indulged in the wonders of Chemical Engineering - I am now a bona fide member of the world of work! To be specific a graduate process engineer.
I started my job 2 weeks ago and have been on a steep learning curve ever since. What I wanted to do briefly in this post was to discuss the type of site place that I am working; next time I'll talk about the responsibilities that I will have.
The site where I work is a major hydrocarbon terminal, i.e. an onshore receiving facility for hydrocarbon fluids after they have been extracted from various reservoirs. To give a bit of background, when oil and gas are produced from reservoirs other components are present that must be dealt with for a number of reasons. They include: water, solids (sand fractions, wax, asphaltenes, naphthalenes, etc.), and acidic gases, such as H2S (hydrogen sulphide) and CO2 (carbon dioxide).
These components additional to the oil and gas must be removed from the fluids for several reasons including, integrity of the systems (i.e. corrosion and erosion of vessels and pipelines) and to meet product specifications (i.e. the standard that the oil and gas products must meet before they can be sold to customers).
The site that I work at removes these nasty components and separates the oil from the gas. The gas tends to be associated (dissolved) in the oil when it is produced - this is known as unstabilised crude. The gaseous components are removed by various stages of heating and reduction of pressure. With the gas removed the crude oil can be sent to export (for sale to customers, i.e. refineries where the crude would be split into fractions including petrol and diesel).
The gas is then split into products including liquified petroleum gas or LPG (mixture of C3 propane and C4 butane), and gas condensate (C5+ heavy ends that are cooled into a liquid). Other uses of the gas are to supply heat energy to certain sections of the plant.
So that's really what the site does in a glorified yet relatively simple nutshell! If anyone has any specific questions just post a comment and I can get back to you. I hope this gives a bit of insight into the front-end process of oil and gas processing and as I said next post I'll talk about my personal role as a graduate engineer.
