whynotchemeng : Graduate

Been a while....into a new role

2009-09-03T12:53:00.005+01:00

Hi all, it's now been a couple of months since I last posted so my apologies. I have been going through a transition period where I have now changed roles and moved from one end of the UK to the other for my company so things have been pretty manic!

For this role I have once again been seconded to a major oil and gas design and service company to work on a green field project: the scope is a new twin-jacket offshore oil production rig. I am embedded in the project Process Engineering team and shall be providing engineering support as with my previous role.

The project is just about to enter FEED (front-end engineering and design) so all of the "sexy" engineering is just beginning. Currently I am working on fluid characterisation. For those with no prior knowledge to design a new platform (or any other processing facility) the fluids passing through (in this instance, a live crude with produced water) need to be properly understood and characterised for developing models and calculations.

Samples of the reservoir fluids were taken during the appraise stage drilling for a number of wells and sent to a specialist laboratory where they determine the composition of the fluid, along with various other thermophysical properties. The data is then interpreted by a PVT (thermodynamics) specialist to fit the test results to a modified equation of state (EoS) so that it can be accurately specified in models.

What I have been tasked with is to tune the data that has come back from the EoS reports so that it matches viscosity and density data for varying conditions produced during laboratory testing. Some of this tuning involves quick back-of-the-envelope calculations whilst the other extreme is fairly laborious trial-and-error methods using a PVT software suite.

On that note the new role has so-far proved challenging and I shall try to maintain these monthly posts regularly again now things have settled down. Until next time.....

Factory Acceptance Test

2009-06-12T11:55:00.005+01:00

During the last month I have continued to be heavily involved in the detailed design on a subsea tie-back to produce a gas reservoir back to an existing offshore platform. Part of this project is to supply a Hydraulic Power Unit (HPU).

For those of you who are not too familiar with the workings of hydrocarbon production from a subsea tie-back, the well is drilled and completed on the seabed with a subsea template, manifold and control module. It is these systems that contain all of the master wing valves and subsea safety valves. As these valves lie on the bottom of the seabed they are controlled from the surface by using hydraulic fluids pumped through umbilicals piggy-backed to the production flowline. The fluids are pumped to the subsea control manifold and then turn the valves before being expelled to the sea (don't worry though, these hydraulic fluids meet all the correct environmental regulations and restrictions!).

The HPU is the skid that resides on the platform consisting of all the pumps and hydraulic fluid tanks etc. that supply these valves. This past week I have spent in the subsea vendors factory where the HPU has been fabricated. Prior to offshore installation it is the job all involved parties to send witnesses along to a Factory Acceptance Test (FAT) to ensure that the kit does what it was designed to do and is safe to install on the facility.

The FAT involved: checking all equipment was correctly tagged and installed in the correct orientation etc.; calibrating all level and pressure instrumentation; testing all instrumentation loops; hydrotesting pipes and tubing; ensuring all alarms function correctly and any executive actions (or process trips) correctly execute when mimicing the extremes of operation. All emergency shutdown actions are also tested.

With these checks made and signed-off the equipment is fit to be installed on the platform. Any items that need to be resolved prior to installation that the FAT showed were not acceptable go onto a "PUNCH LIST". The vendor will then action each of these items and will be signed off prior to the equipment being installed.

The next few weeks for me are going to be involved around site installations and commissioning of equipment. When I return I shall post some information on this blog regarding those. Until then.....

Relief systems

2009-04-29T08:28:00.011+01:00

For those of you who are regular readers you may have noticed that I have been a bit sporadic with my posts of late due to work committments. Hopefully though I should be able to get back on schedule with a post a month.

For this one I thought I would take a small amount of time to talk about relief systems; more specifically relief valves and their sizing. I remember when I was at university that I understood the concept of pressure relief valves (PRVs) and why they were employed (as we don't engineer inherently safe designs) but that was really the limit of my understanding. Hopefully this small post will give you help if you have to do any relief valve sizings in design projects etc.

The main industry standard for PRV sizing is API 520 Part 1. This standard gives a really good overview about pressure relieving devices and explains how you size the orifice inside the PRV controlling the release of overpressure. It also gives guidance on the type of relief scenarios you need to consider, i.e. blocked outlet, fire impingement on a vessel, etc.

Lets take an example of a reactor with a design pressure of 200 barg. The PRV may be set to 200 barg so that in an instance where the maximum allowable operating pressure is exceeded the pressure in the vessel the design case is not exceeded.

The standard guides you through how to determine backpressures on the relief valve (e.g. hydraulic loads on the outlet of the valves caused by other flows or frictional losses in the downstream vent system) and other overpressures which lead you to a set of relieving conditions for the device. These conditions in addition to the reliving fluid properties allow you to calculate the required effective discharge area of the PRV.

This area is then translated into an orifice size from which you can determine the valve body size from a source such as the GPSA Databook. Following this method allows you to obtain all of the necessary process design information for a PRV datasheet. If you want to take it one step further, API 520 Part 2 describes the method for sizing the inlet and outlet pipework to the PRV. The sizes are a function of pressure loss and velocity constraints.

If anyone would like more information feel free to add a comment to the post. Until next time.....

Skiing and detailed design

2009-03-13T10:55:00.004Z

Apologies for the delay since the last posting; work has been busy and I was allowed to take a week's leave to go skiing...well deserved in my opinion!!! So a quick update on what I have been doing in the past few weeks and a look forward to the next month.

Since my last post I have been continuing with the detailed design phase of the gas-condensate subsea tieback project I am working on (details of the job can be found in previous entries). I have spent time in a HAZOP (hazard and operability) safety study providing process support to review our design; completed calculations to provide Instrument Engineers with process data for Venturi/Coriolis flow meters, pressure relief valves, etc; looked in the HP/LP interfaces and pressure protection over the design. I shall touch more on HP/LP interfaces in the next entry: what they are and how they are managed. Hopefully this would be useful consideration for those of you about to do design projects.

Over the next month the detailed design shall be tapering off so a lot of my job will consist of checking vendor information that comes back from the equipment/instrument orders to ensure that everything being fabricated meets the required specfications.

Until then....

Much of the same....

2009-01-21T18:59:00.006Z

Since Christmas I have been busy continuing with the detailed design phase of a new subsea tieback. In place of the usual entry that I write detailing the extents of my day job, today I thought I would provide an insight into the economic and technical drivers behind using a subsea tieback. This entry I suppose is aimed at students who have yet to have much experience in the economic criteria used to evaluate projects.

To take a quick step-back: a quick explanation of a subsea tieback. In the early days of offshore exploration and production of hydrocarbon fluids a platform would typically be constructed to produce from one field (if large), or 2-3 at most if they were in close vacinity. Today, multiphase resevoir fluids can be transported through pipelines over 100's of kms before reaching a reception facility. In the case of the subsea tieback I am working on the receipt of fluids occurs at an existing fixed jacket platform.

Fluids exist in the resevoir in multiple phases: i.e. immiscible liquids, miscible liquids, vapour, water, solids etc. meaning that transporting them in the their raw state requires no immediate separation. By flowing them back to an exisiting platform the costs of the project can be significantly reduced as no offshore production facility needs to be constructed. Alternatively, the subsea line could be directed to an existing/new onshore facility which makes construction/logistical costs a lot less.

Issues with flowing the fluids in multiphase fashion primarily occurs outside of normal operation, i.e. transient operations such as start-up, shutdown, pigging etc., but can also occur in normal operation. Two of the main issues are hydrate formation and intermittent liquids production, known as slugging.

Hydrates form at low temperatures and high pressures and can block lines presenting very expensive/hazardous problems. These conditions can exist in a subsea pipelines prior to start-up or after a prolonged shutdown. In this instance the reservoir can pressure up the line and fluid can cool down to the ambient temperature, i.e. conditions can fall inside of the hydrate formation envelope. To mitigate this the fluids can be inhibited with methanol, or other hydrate inhibitors, to bring the hydrate envelope inside the line conditions until the pressure reduces and temperature increases upon opening of the production choke valve.

Hopefully this small example provides a typical engineering trade-off for new subsea lines, i.e. cost savings versus scale/complexity of design. Next time I hope to give some insight into the extra-curricular life of a process engineering graduate.

Detailed design and Christmas lunches!

2008-12-13T12:19:00.003Z

I'm writing this blog around a week later than anticipated what with the frantic run to get work completed before year end. For the past while I have been busy with the detailed design stage of the subsea tie-back that I mentioned briefly at the end of my last entry. Largely this has involved simulation to determine the configuration of new topsides equipment and process conditions to size valves (FCVs, ESVs, etc.), design of HP-LP interface systems (studies of material specs, relief protection, start-up procedures), among a number of other tasks.

This has been a great learning experience for me and, to date, has been the closest work I have been involved in that mirrors the design projects completed as part of a chemical engineering degree. Obviously the level of detail that is acquired in this type of design work is an order of magnitude greater than that worked to an university, nonetheless one should not underestimate the value of the work completed in the university projects. For me personally the fundamental design skills I gained at university, albethey comparitively rudimentary, have provided me with a substantial foundation on which to rely on.

Other than the work side of the job the past 2 weeks have seen the start of Christmas celebrations in the office with 3 different lunches and/or evenings out. As I have now finished for the festive period (to take 3 lovely weeks off!) I can say that I might get a chance to fully recuperate before my feet hit the ground running again in the new year. Seasons greetings.......

New Challenges

2008-11-04T21:12:00.004Z

After returning from my two week induction I began the next phase of my graduate training (for those of you who have don't know I work for one of the energy majors). The new role sees me seconded to a design contractor who my company employ to manage and deliver engineering projects for a number of our offshore assets.

In the contractors I am working in the guise of a process engineer and am already getting involved in a number of projects for various assets. In the first couple of weeks I was closing out workpacks from the offshore turnaround season. The turnarounds occur in the summer when the platforms come down for a few weeks to perform essential maintenance and modifications. The contractor office provides these packs, detailing scopes of work etc., as I was tasked with closing out the process engineering sections of these. This involved tasks such as "as-building" P&IDs (piping and instrumentation diagrams) to update the master drawings.

Since then I have been doing a whole variety of things including line specification calculations (for the EU Pressurised Equipment Directive), calculations for producing instrument datasheets, process modeling and simulation etc.

In the next month I shall be working on a FEED (front-end engineering design) project to install a subsea tieback. This simply means a pipeline to transport reservoir fluids from a satellite subsea well pad to an existing offshore facility. This will offer me experience in a number of new areas of engineering design; a time I'm sure will prove to be both challenging and interesting.

Official Induction

2008-10-22T08:16:00.005+01:00

For the last two weeks of September I spent my time becoming a fully fledged member of the company's graduate programme. Rather than the usual university style initiations this was much more demanding! This was a two week induction that all graduates in the upstream part of the company have to attend. For those who don't know, or can't remember, I am employed by one of the oil majors.
The premise of the two week induction is rather multilateral. The prime driver is to allow all upstream graduates, irrespective of discipline, to get a much broader cross-business awareness. In addition to that there are the important benefits of networking and, as the attendees come from business units all over the world, it provides an excellent opportunity to expand knowledge of different cultures inside the business and promote diversity.
The two weeks are very intense with relatively early starts and late finishes, followed by the obligatory late nights whilst away on business! The days themselves are split up into workshops, lectures and field-trips: much like university, really! The whole program is slightly concentrated toward the subsurface side but as a chemical engineer, the more I can learn about how we find and exploit oil the better.
So without sounding like I’m in danger of moonlighting as a geologist I now understand the basic constituents that make up a petroleum system – i.e. source, reservoir and cap rocks – and am able to identify such features on outputs from seismic and downhole surveys (downhole surveys are where instruments are put down the drilled wellbore). Apart from general awareness I hope these new found skills will help me in my later career and, as a process engineer in an oil company we can work closely with subsurface engineers, so I’m sure they shall!
Next time I’ll spend time talking about the new job role I have just assumed: the changes and challenges that lie ahead.

Handover and moving

2008-09-04T07:24:00.007+01:00

This week my replacement started who is a process engineer fresh out of university. Like myself, they did a year's placement with the company whilst on their degree, so hopefully the transition will be a slightly smoother one than expected for a complete newbie.

As I move job roles and am relocated at the end of the month, I now have around 2 weeks to hand over all of the tasks that I perform for my everyday job, and then the projects that I have either to complete (or start in some cases!).

So, in a nutshell, that is pretty much my job for the next fortnight. I have a few outstanding things to sign-off on that I shan't be handing over; enough to keep me busy I suppose. After the handover I have around 1 week to get packed and moved to another part of the world (before you think it's exotic, think again: this place is windy, wet and cold with the odd day of moderate sunshine!!!)

Although this sounds a lot it's really not that bad. A moving company do all the hard work whilst I supervise and make the tea ( a process that involves heat transfer, diffusion, thermo.....so i'm sure i'll learn something!) Don't worry, not all chemical engineers are as boring as me!!!

Once I have completed the move by the end of September I am away on a 2 week conference run by the company for graduates. So it's off to a sunny climate to chill-out and take-5 on the company: YEAH RIGHT!!! No, this is conference that promotes diversity and inclusion (as graduates from all over the company's global operations attend), cross-business awareness (graduates are multidisciplines and course runs through from exploration, production, to marketing sales etc.) Feedback I have had from other graduates is that this is a great event but very energy consuming.

After I return to the new abode I'll be starting the new job and ready to do a new post. By then I can feed back on my conference and give you some insight to my new role. Until then......

Preparing for the next stage

2008-07-31T13:54:00.005+01:00

As you may have read in my last post I am soon to be moving job roles. This week I found out that I am being seconded by my company to go and work in an engineering design house. In the oil and gas industry virtually all companies contract out major project work to specialised design companies. These organisations then do all sorts of activities, including FEED (front-end engineering design), engineering, procurement, construction, etc.

The one that I am going to work for primarily do work for the oil and gas industry with a slight bias to offshore assets. As far as I am aware I will be involved in Engineering Modifications and Maintenance which covers a wide array of activities.

So I have around 8 weeks left to complete (or handover) the remainder of my tasks. As I am taking some leave this month that means I am going to be pretty busy for the next while. I hope that the next time I post I have some more firm information on the project I will be working on and will have hopefully completed a number of my current projects.

Project continuation and mini-TAR support

2008-07-03T17:34:00.004+01:00

Since my last post my daily job has been relatively similar to that past couple of months. I have been continuing with running and driving forward a new locked valve project on the site that I work at. This has taken up the vast majority of my time but has been a great experience at interfacing with various teams, i.e. operators, ops engineers, process safety engineers, draftsmen (create P&IDs), integrity engineers etc. It has also been the first time that I have had the opportunity to co-manage a project of this scale from start to finish. This will hopefully be fully implemented by the end of September.

The other ticket item for this week is providing process engineering support to a mini-TAR (turnaround). This is the time of the year when the areas of the plant shuts down to carry out essential maintenance etc. This is a great opportunity for a young, budding engineer like myself to get to see the insides of vessels and other such equipment that at university you would only see as a black and white representative schematic.

For instance, this week on site I have been able to see some of our C3 (propane) driers have their media changed out. The driers use a zeolite molecular sieve to remove any remaining water molecules and H2S (downstream of our acid gas sweetening units) before exporting on to our refrigerated/pressurised LPG facilities. This process involved purging and isolating of the vessels, followed by removal of the spent media and re-fill with the new molecular sieve.

For those of you who become, or aspire to one day be, chemical engineers working in industry, there is little experience better than getting involved in these sorts of activities to learn about these bits of kit.

In September I will be leaving the site I am currently working at and begin a new placement in another part of the company; that will be for the 2nd year of my graduate early experience programme. I am due to find out where that will be in the next week or so, and will therefore be able to give you some insight to that in my next post. Until then......

Training and annual leave

2008-06-03T12:50:00.003+01:00

The past few weeks have been considerably more low-key than the previous couple of months. I managed to get some time away from the usual day job on a 2-day course in London and then had a week's leave (which was most welcome!)

The 2-day training was an advanced course on Heat Exchange Simulation and Design. During my internship I completed the prerequisite course on general heat transfer - very similar material to that covered in a chemical engineering degree although more biased towards applications in the oil and gas industry.

This latest course concentrated on several things - one of these was how to do quick sense check calculations on designs that you have commissioned a contractor to complete. Not saying that people don't trust the design offices, but as an engineer it is always advisable to sense check data, designs etc. (especially when the unit operations are going to costs hundreds of thousands or even millions of pounds!)

The course then went on to cover detailed design philosophies for a whole array of exchanger types. The scope of this was well beyond that which was taught in my Masters degree. This included things such as designing to prevent mechanical damage via acoustic vibrations - this is when the fluid resonates at the same frequency as the tube bundles it is passing.

So all in all, it was a most informative course, and a great refresher after such a busy period on the plant prior to this. The next month will involve me carrying on with much that I was doing before. Until next time......

Short-term contingency engineering

2008-05-09T10:35:00.004+01:00

This past month has probably been up there in the busiest I have yet to experience - even beating final year design projects!!! After completing two large pieces of work at the back end of April, I was drafted into a large contingency project with a scope of being completed within the order of weeks.

The project was to acquire, install, commission and start-up some package boilers capable of raising steam in the event of the local supply from a power station being interrupted. A similar project was completed several years ago with a seven month scope; this project was due in 7 weeks!

It has been a great experience for me, albeit tiring, and given me exposure to a number of engineering elements that I had yet to experience. These include project planning, safety engineering reviews, civils and ground preparation, installation (large-scale plumbing!), and preparation for commissioning.

In the next few weeks I will be involved in turning these new boilers on and seeing the net result of a couple of months' hard work. This I am really looking forward to.

In the interim I have a two-day Heat Exchanger Design course to attend and a few days annual leave; something that is ever so welcome!

HAZOPs - what real engineering's made of!

2008-04-09T08:55:00.003+01:00

For those of you who are reading this as informed students of chemical/process engineering, you should be well aware of the term HAZOP. For those of you who don't know this term it stands for Hazard and Operability; some would argue this is synonymous with tedious, mundane and boring; opinions that I may have sympathised with in my early uni years! Actually A HAZOP study if a very useful tool to learn some great things.

A HAZOP study is a major parameter of process safety and must be completed for all areas of operating sites. What simply happens is you split areas of the plant up into individual sections known as nodes and assess potential hazards; a node, for instance, may be a fractionation column including the ancillaries, i.e. reboiler, condenser, reflux pumps, etc.

Upon assigning, each node is taken on a one-by-one basis and hazards assessed using a list of deviation keywords. These would include things such as MORE FLOW/LESS FLOW/NO FLOW/REVERSE FLOW/MISDIRECTED FLOW etc. for a wide array of process parameters. The various engineers then use these keywords to assess associated hazards.

The whole idea is that you use an open mind to even the 1-in-1000000 events say, and then the engineers lists causes and consequences of the hazard, any safeguards present (i.e. process trips/relief valves etc.), and any recommendations to make the design or operation of the plant more inherently safe.

Being involved in my first HAZOP has proved a great learning tool. Although I have worked on my current site for 7 months, so I thought I had a pretty good understanding of things, the HAZOP really glued all of my knowledge together. The ability to think about unit operations behaving as they're designed to is one thing, but to be able to consider what happens if they don't is an invaluable tool for an engineer.

So my message is rather simple: although process safety lectures might not seem as interesting as reaction engineering, transport phenomena etc., they provide the backbone to every process engineering job. To be a competent process engineer, whether as an operator/designer/technical authority, you have to be able to consider the safety consequences of everything you do; if you don't then things can go wrong. So when you next have design projects or smaller type exercises really give some thought to the safety features that need to be applied.

Locked-open / locked-closed valves

2008-03-26T16:13:00.004Z

For the majority of the next month I am going to be tied up with two significant pieces of work. One is a continuing plant modification that I have been working on since I began my time here. The other is updating the locked-open/locked-closed (LO/LC) valve register and P&IDs.

I imagine that for the vast quantity of you that the notion of LO/LC valves is a foreign thing; it certainly was for me until I worked on an operational site. The concept literally means that during normal operation certain valves will be locked open or closed using a physical device preventing them from being put in the wrong position.

The premise for leaving valves locked in position is down to safety and environmental considerations. Take for instance the case of a relief system on a distillation column. Imagine that the unit is operating at 30 barg and a process upset realises a vapour pressure at the top of the column of 34 barg. A PSV (pressure safety valve) then lifts and relieves the pressure into the flare system. To enable that this safety critical device can function properly, any isolation valves upstream of the valve (between the column and PSV) and downstream of the valve (between the PSV and flare header) need to be open to relieve the pressure; if they are closed then the system will continue to pressure with potentially devastating consequences.

To avoids such incidents, especially where human error may play a part (i.e. if after replacing a valve an operator forgets to re-open the valve) the valve is physically locked open. To compliment this a register is kept in the control room explaining the position the valves are supposed to be in, and the positions they currently hold.

An example of a locked-closed valve may be on a vessel containing hydrocarbons operating at 2 barg. During a maintenance period the vessel is taken out of commission and isolated. The pressure is first relieved and the hydrocarbons are then drained by opening a valve flowing to a closed-drains system. This valve to the closed-drains will be locked-closed in normal operation to prevent higher pressure hydrocarbons entering an atmospheric system. This is known as a HP/LP (high pressure/low pressure) interface.

This means that in the next few weeks I have to review around 300 P&IDs and ensure that both the diagrams and register reflect the true nature of our asset. Lots to keep me busy.....!

Change of plan!

2008-03-19T10:24:00.004Z

If you read my last post you will remember that I have been away on a 2 week course. My plan on the back of this was to go through some of the things that I learnt; at least, outside of the normal process engineering remit.

Unfortunately, that will take slightly more time than I have at the moment so I will save it for another day. The reason for my lack of time is that I work on an operational asset. This means that the majority of my time is spent dealing with the daily running of the plant, and much more importantly: keeping the oil in the pipeline!

On a site such as the one I work at there are monthly, quarterly, yearly inspections of equipment etc. This will be to assess the integrity of the unit, operability and availability. Before these inspections can happen/or on the back of them, there is much work to do. It just so happens that my return after 2 weeks coincides with a increased workload attributable to such inspections.

So, until next time.......

Return to uni and a 2 week course

2008-02-26T16:26:00.003Z

Today's note is unfortunately going to have to be brief; I have only 2 days left before I am out of the office for a fortnight on training. This means that I am frantically trying to get all of my work rounded-up before finishing.

The course that I am going on is titled 'Upstream Process Engineering'. The scope will cover all upstream processing in the oil and gas industry, i.e. everything upstream from refining. This encapsulates exploration, production, delivery and stabilisation. The great thing about this is that it will be 10 days going back over the fundamentals from my degree, whilst building on my knowledge base with respect to some of the other engineering disciplines, i.e. mechanical (rotating equipment, positive movers, etc.), instrument and electrical (process indication, signalling, etc.), civil, rheological (fluid transport phenomena), etc.

This is something that I am really looking forward to. The other item on the upcoming agenda is returning to my old university for the department ball with a few of my alumna peers. This should be a great laugh and will be an opportunity to see a lot of folk that I haven't for a while.

What I will try and do next time is cover some of things that I pick up on this course that are outside of the normal chemical engineering remit, but I think you may find interesting/useful.

Ambassador of the arts (of science and engineering!)

2008-02-14T11:22:00.004Z

If any of you are avid readers you may remember that I am a Science and Engineering Ambassador which means that I get involved with an array of activities that promote the disciplines in local schools. This means that I have to get people aged 7-19 interested in science! An enjoyable albeit challenging task; well the younger children really enjoy it!

We ran a workshop in a local primary school recently where the children were able to make slime using washing detergent, PVA glue and food colouring. Most of the young ones now think that scientists spend all day making slime and want to sign up to it right away!

Next week I am going into a class of 10-11 year olds and talking to them about solar energy. During this workshop they will get the opportunity to learn how plants make energy from the sun and how engineers have managed to manipulate technology to harness this energy in a similar fashion. What the children will learn is relatively basic, i.e. a bulb connected to a solar panel will glow brighter when the light source is more intense, when the angle of the panel approaches the perpendicular, et cetera.

The more important message for the children to capture is why we're interested in solar energy and these renewable sources. Most at that age understand that oil and gas will one day run out, but by exposing them directly to the types of technology that may one day power their homes and towns, they can get a sense of the engineering challenges of the future.

This is one part of my job (although volunteered) that I find really rewarding and enjoyable.

New environmental and pollution control regulations

2008-01-29T09:08:00.000Z

The last few weeks have remained busy with many continuing jobs from the latter part of 2007. Something that I have become more involved in, and I can't remember if I have spoke to you about this previously!, is the HSE side of our emissions. For those who read this blog regularly you may remember that I look after the monitoring of flaring emissions and effluent discharges from our site. New legislation has meant changes to the ways we now do things. Although this may seem a bit of an environmental/legal talk rather than engineering, many chemical engineers get involved in these issues as it is our job to help make sure we operate within the constrains of the permits.

Our previous monitoring methods were dictated by the old IPC (Integrated Pollution Control) regulations established by the Environmental Protection Act 1990. The new, and current, regulatory framework is known as PPC (Pollution Prevention and Control), established by the PPC Act 1999, which has subtle differences from the old system and had to be implemented between 2000 and 2007.

IPC required that industry had to employ the BATNEEC (Best Available Technology Not Entailing Excessive Costs) whereas this has now been altered to the BAT (Best Available Technology). To go into these differences I recommend looking at the Environment Agency's website. The new PPC regulations implement the requirements stipulated in the EU directive IPPC (Integrated Pollution and Control) [EU/96/61]. Information on EU directives, amongst other legislation, can be found through the EUR-Lex electronic portal (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/index.htm).

As an operator with various emissions to air and discharges to water we must have in place a permit for the new PPC regulations. This was granted on our ability to control these factors using the BATs.

One new area on our consent permit also covers the EU ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme) that was implemented in 2005 and was the world's first such scheme. The ETS was set up following the EU's GHG (greenhouse gas) reduction target of 8% below 1990's levels set out in the Kyoto protocol. aims to reduce CO2 emissions by creating a carbon-market and placing a price on the element. Each operator is set with a cap on allowances for emissions and these may be traded with other operators to allow for flexibility in operation, but all the time making companies more aware of the amount of GHG they are emitting. Read more at the DEFRA (Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs) website.

For me this means that I have to review all the mass balances on our site's emissions of GHGs to ensure that we report accurately the total amounts. I find this type of activity rather enjoyable as you are applying the fundamental of chemical engineering (i.e. mass balances) to a real-life situation and one that is gaining a lot of press coverage to its effectiveness and validity. The great news for any aspiring engineers is that a career, even in the same industry, is always changing presenting new challenges and things to get involved in!

Returning after the Christmas hols

2008-01-08T17:21:00.000Z

With a belly full of turkey and trimmings I returned to work this week for the start of a new year. It was a manic end to 2007 but I must admit that enjoyed the challenge!

2008 has started at a running pace. There are several new projects at work that I have been quickly assigned to and will take up a fair slice of my time in Q1. On top of this I have several weeks of training courses (education doesn't stop once you're a professional!) and corporate functions; so much to look forward to.

I will leave this post as a short note for now and give you more insight into my new itinerary in the next week or so. Best of luck for those of you just about to sit exams!

Capturing early experience

2007-12-18T16:28:00.000Z

This past few weeks have been keeping me nice and busy; with year-end fast approaching there have been many actions and jobs that have required closing out. The good news is that it appears I have managed to complete all task actions cited against me - this means that I have about 3 days before I break for Christmas to give me time to concentrate on some different types of work.

The graduate program that I am part of combines 3 yearly placements that, by the time of completion, aim to cover a vast array of core and technical competencies. During each yearly placement I am to sit an assessment panel that looks and competencies I have gained, and more importantly the ones I have gaps in. The panel then try and assign me to a placement for the following rotation that will give me the opportunity to address these issues.

In order to properly gauge where I am at with the competencies I must present evidence to the panel (reviewed by my line manager) that illustrates aptitude in the particular area. This means that I have a (pro-active) responsibility to log the experience that I gain throughout the placement.

As I have not had the chance to record my activities over the past weeks I thought that I would take some time over these 3 (quieter!) days to try and update my logs. This sounds like quite a mundane task but personally I don't mind it. Not only does it remind me of what I have done throughout my time, but it is also valid for presenting evidence to professional insititutions (i.e. IChemE) one day when I am looking to gain professional qualifications (i.e. chartership).

Other than that, it's time for me to enjoy the holidays. For those of you also finishing for the year, enjoy the break and happy new year!

The run up to year end - deadlines and parties to ensue!

2007-12-06T16:16:00.000Z

Although it feels as though no time has passed at all since I left university, Christmas is nearly here meaning my priority is work that needs completing by year-end. With that said you can understand that it is now a busy time - no different to trying to fit in all revision before exam though, I suppose.

The reward for the effort are the work parties and leave that are coming. Tomorrow is our works do which is an all-day affair and is something that I have been looking forward to. But when I get back to the office on Monday, I only have 9 working days left before I go on leave; this means not much time to do a fair amount of work!

Next week I will be going to a local primary school and making slime with the infants! Who thought so much fun could come from borax, PVA glue and food colouring!?! Although the kids have great fun, especially from the sounds it makes when squeezed into containers!, they get to understand some principles behind different fluid properties etc.

So, apart from work and parties, there's much to look forward to in the coming weeks. I hope those of you with deadlines before year-end manage to get everything finished!

Some time to reflect!

2007-11-20T10:36:00.000Z

It's been nearly 3 months since I began my new life as a graduate process engineer and, I must say, it is going really well. I find the work challenging and difficult at times but that makes it all the more exciting. Recently I was involved with resolving some short-term operational issues and it was the first time that I ever had to think so fast. That's the great thing with an operational job like this, no two days are the same and there are always problem solving activities to get involved in.

Now though comes some well deserved leave, or at least I think so! I am going to go back home for a few days now to recharge the batteries and am lucky enough to be collecting an award at the same time for achievements during my degree. This is something I've been looking forward to for a while now.

Next week when I get back to work I will be on the final run-up to Christmas. That means that all of the tasks that must be completed before year-end are going to prioritise my time. I'm sure that it will be a busy few weeks but the break over the holidays will allow me to recuperate. By the year-end I also have to complete several tasks related to my personal development; maybe I can discuss these more in my next post. Until then......

Extra-"curricula" activities

2007-11-06T09:22:00.000Z

Outside of the day-to-day duties that my job entails, I try and get myself heavily involved in promoting the science and engineering world; a scope that goes beyond just chemical engineering. Working for a large multinational really helps in this process but, as you can tell from reading this, the IChemE and other professional institutions really help people to spread the message.

Over the next month I will be participating in a number of these activites. The first one is going to an award ceremony for the top chemical engineers from local universities. My company sponsor the prize and my task will be to present to them the type of career they could have in the energy sector. This is a great opportunity to meet and talk to people and is one of the ways in which I first became interested in this industry when I was at university.

I am also due to go to a local primary school before Christmas and lead activities with children aged 7-11. I really enjoy these days and helping the children realise that science and engineering are not boring subjects, or those where you just wear white coats or get dirty. The children really seem to engage in these days and its a great way of getting involved in the local community.

If you guys ever get the opportunity to be involved in such activities I would really recommend it. Not only is it good for a CV, as it shows a passion to encourage people to consider science and engineering, but it is great fun and allows you to experience much more than your day job would normally permit.

Operability and availability studies

2007-10-25T16:40:00.000+01:00

One of the roles that I have inherited from my predecesor is a daily and monthly monitoring of how the plant is performing against a set of operational criteria. The digital way in which modern plants are monitored and controlled provides enormous benefits to the old analogue days, one of the largest being that personnel who operate the boards in the control room can see how the plant is behaving in real time.

As with all processes there are optimum conditions that provide an envelope for which to operate inside. These envelopes mean that the plant can run reliably without causing issues to individual unit operations, or subsequent issues to processes located up- or downstream of our site.

A way of managing this is to look at which envelope limits have been exceeded on a daily basis, and investigating for how long the excursion occured, to what degree, what caused it, what were the consequences, what was done to remedy it, et cetera.

By looking at these sort of issues a historical database is created for the operational issues of the site, both from quite normal events (i.e. a compressor trips) to less regular events (i.e. an offshore injection of chemicals which impacts on the gas molecular sieve driers). At the end of every month I look at the most severe in terms of those which reduce our availability to process and export hydrocarbons, to those which could have the potential to cause mechanical integrity issues, for instance.

By investigating the operation of a plant in such away allows the operators and engineers to be pro-active in their approach and expect issues before they occur. This is just another safety measure to prevent incidents from occuring and one which a process engineer plays a vital role.