Background

Flaring is a crucial safety measure in integrated refinery and petrochemical complexes, serving to safely dispose of associated gas arising from factors like excess pressure, faulty equipment, process reliability issues, or plant shutdowns. While essential for safety, inadequate monitoring of flaring can result in significant hydrocarbon and energy losses, adversely impacting overall plant profitability. This is particularly pertinent in high-throughput integrated complexes, where effective flare monitoring becomes pivotal to identify potential strategies for minimizing flaring rates.

The challenges in monitoring multiple flare stacks simultaneously, compounded by unreliable transmitter readings and the absence of flow meters in certain equipment, necessitate innovative solutions. Leveraging PI AF functionality in conjunction with PI Vision proves instrumental in overcoming these challenges.

Solution

By utilizing available data from control valves, correlations can be established to estimate the flow for each flare source. For units without flow meters at the battery limit, flare flow is estimated by totalizing the calculated flow from identified flare sources. The calculated flow data is configured through templates in PI AF, integrating information on control valve opening, valve tag names, and equipment names.

The insights derived from these calculations are visualized effectively through a Flare Monitoring Dashboard created with PI Vision. This dashboard serves as a single platform where operations, process engineers, and environmental engineers can trace flare sources from the flare stack to each unit and respective equipment. The dashboard facilitates quick identification of the source of flaring based on trends, allowing for prompt corrective actions.

This comprehensive approach enables higher management to view a summary of the plant's performance, while energy and utilities engineers can delve into detailed flare source identification for performance assessment and reduction planning when necessary. The dashboard thus plays a pivotal role in compliance, reporting, and continuous improvement, serving diverse stakeholders in the complex, including operations, process engineers, environmental engineers, and higher management.

The solution holds potential to be replicated and customized as per business needs across upstream and integrated gas as well, where flaring of excess gas is also seen.