I’ve worked a few times as a process engineer in an operational role directly supporting operations – an oil refinery hydrogen and hydrocracking unit, an oil stabilisation and gas fractionation terminal, and an oil producing FPSO. A grand total of ~10 years of not knowing what’s going to come your way from one day to the next! One of the hallmarks of operations is its dynamic nature. Things are constantly changing on the plant. From the process variables through to the fabric of the equipment and everything in between. All these changes need to be recognised and controlled in some way to prevent a loss of product quality, interruptions to production, or potential safety incidents.
As a process engineer supporting operations your main job is to figure out what variables are important to the business and ensure adequate controls are in place and working. Over and above this, there are usually a million and one requests for information from all sorts of people, including projects, business development, central technical functions and commercial departments. All of whom want to mess with your plant in some way!
So how do you survive and thrive as a process engineer supporting operations? Some initial thoughts which I’ll come back to and develop in a later post.
1. Accept the fact – things will change hour to hour, day to day, week to week, month to month…..and as a result you need to hold priorities loosely or re-frame them at a macro level in terms of overall business objectives which largely don’t change.
2. Get to know the plant. Where is it ticklish, what changes is it particularly sensitive to, what are its real limits, what margins does it need to operate stably? This requires careful observation over time to identify patterns. And it requires regular communication with control room operators.
3. Establish the root causes of operating problems and go after them relentlessly. This requires a working knowledge of the equipment and how all the components are linked together. Process engineers are responsible for the “process” i.e. the series of sequential steps used to transform raw materials to finished products. Therefore, for any issue, you need to go back upstream to look for potential causes and go downstream to establish how the issue affects the rest of the plant. Pay particular attention to recycles and points of accumulation. These can be at a chemical component level as well as total material.
4. Accept the fact – there will always be more to do than time available to do it. You need to be selective in choosing which problems to work on. #2 and #3 above are critical to selecting the right things.