4 Wednesday, October 8, 2008 National Petrochemical and Refining Association 2008 Q&A and Technology Forum

Refineries are a busy and bustling place. Shipments of crude come in, and various shipments of refined products go out on a constant basis every day. The logistics of managing and keeping track of all this infor-mation is daunting. And if the staff of a refinery makes an error in how much capacity they have, or if an employee or broker orders too much or too little crude, it can have devas-tating economic consequences.

A well-managed refinery that is on top of such things with pinpoint precision and manages their deliver-ies in an up-to-the-minute fashion—knowing how much product is on the grounds at any one time and how much is leaving in 30 minutes or per-haps tomorrow—is a refinery that is going to maximize profit. In these uncertain times for refiners, utilizing resources to the fullest and maximiz-

ing profit are immensely important.That’s why M3 Technology decided

to develop their SIMTO advanced scheduling system. According to Bob Hutchings of M3, they first began developing SIMTO around 2002. Early users of the system were

Valero, Chevron and Tesoro.“It started out mainly as schedul-

ing the main tank to tank transfers and process units,” Mr. Hutchings said. “Now, there have been addi-tions of crude blending, gasoline blending and other product blend-ing. There has been an addition to handle the terminals at the facili-ties, like scheduling the ships in and looking to minimize wait time. It is a rapidly evolving product.”

The interoperability of the system is really what gets Mr. Hutchings talk-ing. “It all can be run in one execut-able. That’s a really big deal. Before you would have to have all the dif-ferent systems, and it was very prob-lematic trying to integrate or interface them,” he said. “If you are solving one problem at the docks, that doesn’t carry on through. You would have to have another program to do refin-

ing scheduling and blending. Things change all the time. It made it a very time-consuming effort.”

Mr. Hutchings laughs when recall-ing that it was only recent history where dock scheduling and fuels blending was still being done in Excel spreadsheets. Twenty years before spreadsheets was a time of pencil-to-paper recordkeeping.

The spreadsheets had grown into such huge monsters that only one nor two people in the organization could understand or manipulate them. Those were usually people who had been around a long time, the grey-beards. And with the current aging workforce problem in the down-stream industry, most of those folks are going to be retired in five years.

This realization is what helped M3 to develop SIMTO. According to Mr. Hutchings, “We have a generalized refinery demo that we use in-house and it goes from the crude arriv-als, crude blending and transfers to units, making cuts of various prod-ucts and running them off to various process upgrading units.

“Those products wind up as fuels blending components and then we’ll go into a multi-period blend opti-mization. So you can start out with your crude coming in and look at a 30- or 60-day crude schedule and then we will schedule, those into the tanks so this can be coming in by ship or pipeline.”

Mr. Hutchings cited the recent hurricanes on the US Gulf Coast as one of the factors that make the ability to change plans at a refinery quickly very important.

“You’ve got plants in Louisiana and Houston. If a storm is coming in, it could really knock out operations. You have to look at the option of diverting a ship away from the storm toward, say, Corpus Christi,” Mr. Hutchings said when detailing how his software could help a refinery. “With our software, you’ve got that optionality and ability to reschedule everything. What this allows a refin-ery organization to do is to make this decision in under an hour and have qualitative data to back up the decision. They can confirm there is adequate space at the other refinery and that they can accept this ship-ment. It greatly helps with efficiency and can eventually positively affect the bottom line.” ■

M3 Technology is excited about its advanced scheduling systemBob Hutchings talks at length about how SIMTO can have a positive impact on refinery management

Bob Hutchings of M3 says SIMTO is a “rapidly evolving product.”

This screen shot of SIMTO shows how adept it is about coaxing order out of chaos.

Refinery scheduling has come a long way in the last 20 years, as evidenced by the SIMTO system.

Dr. Dong Dong of M3 has an innate understanding of their scheduling system, and played a crucial role in its design and implementation.