“What comes in must go out”. This is the general philosophy of material movement across the plant. Be it material, data, or information, everything occupies space either physically or digitally. Thus, it must be counted and secured for proper usage and analysis.

For example, in a refinery, materials such as crude from upstream are imported, processed at site using several units and multiple oil movement operations, and finally sold as products to generate revenue.

While this process looks simple, a Planner understands that this is easier said than done at the ground level. The whole supply chain needs to be managed swiftly and especially at times when pandemics, such as COVID-19 occurs.

Let’s see from the overview of the refinery work cycle.

1.     Planning: Crude selection and production estimations are done in this step at-least one month ahead of crude processing

2.    Scheduling: The Planner breaks down tasks in detail, and writes work indication document around a week ahead of the operation step.

3.    Operation/Execution: This is the production phase of all the daily work procedures.

4.    Accounting/Analysis: During this step, accountants collect all the possible meter values and operational data to make reports. This report is used for material loss detection, planning improvement, official record, and any kind of executive decision making. This could be daily, weekly, monthly, and any other time period.

Customer Challenges

A decision based on data, is not intuitive, it is cognitive. To arrive at the right decision, a reliable accounting system is essential. Common challenges customers face are seen below.

Need of a Solution

The purpose of any production accounting methodology is to obtain high quality data in a timely fashion. It should support the unique version of the truth for process decision making.

But high quality data can be expensive. It requires the collection of many pieces synchronized and maintained in an integrated workflow to guarantee data consistency. Users need easy and high visibility across the entire process, with information flowing at the end of the day from left to right (Fig. 3) with allowances for internal workflows. In this case, information, taken care by different groups of people, can flow in both directions to support a collaborative environment.

So, from a comprehensive approach, three groups of functions are identifiable within a production accounting process, these are: data collection, data validation, and data exposure.

Based on Process Industry experience one can understand that a good system is the one, that can cover the production accounting process end–to-end. To achieve best-in-class procedures, the Production Accounting System needs visibility and control of the data, from its origin through the entire process to the end.

Solution

Visual MESA Production Accounting (VM-PA) address these problems (Fig. 3) to achieve best-in-class accounting.

How Does VM-PA Deliver?

• By providing a holistic solution (end-to-end) for the entire production accounting business process from data capture, though validation and data exposure. An all-in-one system is better for visibility and model maintenance.

• By delivering expeditious accounting procedures that guarantee refinery-wide daily long-term sustainability. This creates time for other tasks on top of the time required to the accounting itself.

• By providing additional analytical scenarios as built-in functionalities provides extra time for analysis, rather than building the analytical context.

• By integrating engineering knowledge, as built-in functionalities to maximize the value of the reconciled balance data.

Data Collection

VM-PA Data collection (Fig.4) can handle Inventory, Movement and Flow meter data entry. It also allows multiple input source such as PI system, DCS/SCADA system, and others including user manual entry.

Data Validation/Reconciliation

In the Reconciliation Function (Fig.5), VM-PA uses an advanced algorithm. It has bulk Mass or by components reconciliation. The gross error detection engine is easy to use with color coding and dynamic model representation to closely monitor the system.

Composition Tracking

Composition tracking is also one of the main functions of VM-PA. It calculates composition for tanks, streams, and multi-product pipelines. This can be applied to any type of product, mostly it is used to track crude oil composition (Fig 6).

Knowing the composition of crude oil elements helps refineries in following aspects:

• Crude oil tank composition to set the correct baseline for scheduling to obtain the desired products.

• Feed composition for the CDU allows calculation of expected yields.

• If the crude oil is received in remote terminals that are connected to the refineries via pipelines, it should be possible to track the batched within the pipelines from the source (terminal) to the destination (refineries) in order to accomplish items 1 and 2.

• VM-PA composition tracking to perform “Ownership tracking” for plants that process feedstock belonging to more than on owner (joint venture projects or refineries that sell distillation services to external companies.)

Data Exposure

More than 45 standard reports (Fig. 7), are available with the ability to create custom reports using the report builder.

VM-PA can also provide Energy Balance Calculations (Fig. 8)

At this moment Visual MESA Production Accounting is running at more than 23 sites globally. Customers are mostly refineries and their associated terminals, both local and remote. There are some petrochemical and to a lesser extent LNG sites, as well.