Tank farms are among the most important assets in a crude oil refinery and demand special attention during design, operation and maintenance steps. Unfortunately, part of the refining personnel and managers do not have adequate knowledge about the relevance of this operating area in a crude oil refinery and the priority of maintenance and capital investments in transfer and stockpiling assets are underrated in relation to the refining units. It’s important to taking account that the asset management of transfer and stockpiling assets needs special policies in comparison with processing units once normally these assets don’t have periodically maintenance shutdown steps, the inspection and preventive maintenance policies need to be more restrictive considering that the failure of transfer and stockpiling assets can lead to the worst emergency scenarios of a typical crude oil refinery.
The video registered in a crude oil refinery at Louisiana (USA) in 2023 is an didactic example of the relevance of adherence of the design and construction of storage tanks to the standards and design rules, the weak roof welding is an important item of the design and construction step of the hydrocarbon storage tanks in order to avoid catastrophic explosions like demonstrated in the video which can lead to a worst scenario in the process accident, it’s interesting to note the effectiveness of the weak roof welding mechanism, this video also alerts about the relevance of the adequate design and installation of atmospheric discharge protection systems in hydrocarbon storage tanks, it’s important to check how is the integrity of the grounding systems of our tank farms. Despite this case description, it’s important to keep our vulnerability sense and understand that all downstream player in any country is subjected to these risks and the actions which really can block these occurrences is an adequate and sustainable asset management policy based on the sustainability tripod People, Planet, and Profit (Three Ps) that establishes the bases of a most sustainable management aiming to prioritize the life and environment in detriment of the business if necessary… How is your asset management policy?
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