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Specifications

• 70,000 tags collected
• 17 Different Process Units
• DCS System & Honeywell PHD
• Trend Historian
• Trend Link
• Trend Web
• Trend Calc

Company Profile - Valero Energy Corporation

Acquired in 2005, the Delaware City refinery contributes to Valero’s strategy of converging heavy, sour feedstocks into cleaner-burning fuels, thus capturing better margins than our peers. Contributing to the plant’s efficiency is its 1,800-tons-per-day petroleum-coke gasification unit and 160-megawatt cogeneration power plant. The refinery’s petroleum coke production is sold to third parties or is gasified to fuel the cogeneration facility, which is designed to supply electricity and steam to the refinery.

The Delaware City Refinery has a capacity of 175,000 barrels a day. The major refining processes include: one crude unit, sulfur recovery, gas plant, alkylation/ether polymerization, naphtha treater, a cat cracker, coker, hydrocracker, desulfurizing, CCR reformer and one hydrogen plant.

Situation

The refinery was using Foxboro DCS control systems, and it was not addressing the need of the facility. The operators and engineers needed a more responsive and improved ability to perform complex trending on more than 70,000 tags from 17 different Process Units. The IT department was also concerned with support and software distribution, given the size of the facility and the number of operators and engineers that needed access to this information.

Outcome

Operators now have a clear and reliable view of both the real-time and historical trends to build a good understanding of the current plant conditions, with Canary Labs running 24/7 (for the last 14 years).

Through the improved visibility into plant operations, process engineers have been able to increase productivity, resulting in significant output gains and revenues for the refinery. This increased production was done without any impact to EPA requirements on air quality and emissions.

The refinery has been a customer for over 20 years, going through technology advancements with us, migrating platforms and performing upgrades. We now support 2 other refineries, providing our complete solution, integrated with DCS and other installed historians such as Honeywell’s PHD, with Trend Link embedded into the intranet for ease of access regardless of where you are in the refinery.