 | ||
 | | |
 | ||
| | |
 | ||||||||||||||
|  |  | |  | |  | |  | |  | | |||
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
 | ||||||||
Dutch IGCC pioneers chalk up pain and gain Emergency response is behind schedule in the European public sector A new refining industry in Europe's Asian Corridor Commission proposes milestone energy proposal Replace fuel oil with distillate? Cancelled projects will sustain margins “Marine distillate not fuel oil from 2010” Branson's biofuels megastore You heard it here first: refinery CO2 storage a reality in Norway Buncefield 2: Investigation critical Where now for Swedish Class 1 diesel My slow awakening to climate change The luckiest motorist alive Safety row goes on over Europe's largest LNG terminal New WHO guidelines on city air quality put focus on diesel Would LNG really 'evaporate harmlessly' in an accident? Another lesson in the thermobaric bomb Spare a thought for the oil-rich But will the good times keep on rolling? Carbon storage and the zero emissions refinery Everything just changed E85 and high octane gasolines The problem of small-minded young engineers New Permit Regulations Biodiesel newbuilds and a new green superfuel Spilled wine and our split industry Drilling down into the prospects for IGCC The beginning of the start of the end of oil | Compliance projects grow as new permits deadlines loom If it feels as if a trickle of small capital projects is getting to be a flood, then you’re not on your own. It’s no accident that there’s a lot more on your plate if you’re running a process plant in Europe. Hopefully, your local environment agency has pressed home the significance of October 2007. If they haven’t, then the next 50 months could be a rough ride: It’s time folks to apply for your all-new, all-encompassing permits to be in business. Nine years after the adoption of the Integrated Pollution Prevention Control Directive (IPPC) in 1996, the clock is counting down to implementation. IPPC is far reaching. It covers everything from noise to CO2, from the top of your FCC, to the feed of your furnace. The integrated or ‘cross media’ aspect of the new permits means that if you scrub some stack emissions, you’ll still have to account for the waste water pollution that results. The European harmonisation of industrial permits is aimed at preventing a migration of polluting industries (and one presumes, chemical engineers’ jobs) to laxer legislatures to the poorer east of the EU. Measures taken to comply with IPPC include emissions monitoring, filtering, scrubbing, feedstock exchange, process modifications, energy initiatives, vapour reduction initiatives, pump changes… well, you name it. It’s barely plausible that work to comply with Europe’s new permits system hasn’t been going on at your site for years now. The UK, with its earlier Integrated Pollution Control (IPC) legislation, had a leading role in the development of IPPC. Refiners there are on a tight schedule and must file their applications for permits at the start of next year. Failure to comply could ultimately result in a permit to operate being withdrawn. In practice, refiners are already implementing improvement plans in order to meet IPPC requirements. Compliance with the rules is a different kind of beast to the process of coping with the other drivers in the market place – that’s to say, clean fuels, clean fuel oils, crude slate and capacity issues. The Fuels Directive, and now to some extend the Marine Fuels Directive, has led to largish capital projects getting the go-ahead across Europe to reduce fuel sulphur levels. As I write there’s this wave of hydrocrackers going – bigger projects which wouldn’t make sense without diesel quality issues, but are largely a matter of crude slate flexibility and Russian oil. Here we’re talking about investments in the EUROS 300 to 500 million range. Newly, the refining industry is looking over the brink. Margins are great and that means that refining VP’s are leafing back through those multi-client studies, chewing over utlisation rates and wondering whether they feel lucky. They’re wondering if they should increase capacity and make hay in the sunshine of strong fundamentals? But they’re afraid that the snakes and ladders of our cyclical industry will cause the margins that justify bold action to plummit and destroy profits. A world away from that game of chance is the work-a-day, stay-in-business spending that keeps refineries running and sustains contractors through those long periods when it seems like a whole industry is sitting on its hands. IPPC compliance projects tend to be more on this scale. But they’re increasingly numerous. And many sites are now addressing a tranche of IPPC projects, at the same time as building new clean fuels or feedstock exchange units. “The implementation of the IPPC Directive has an end date in 2007, but different member states have been allowed to implement it in different ways and on different schedules,” says an environment specialist at a European contracting office. “In Italy it all has to happen by the drop dead date in 2007,” he says. UK refiners, terminals, gas processors and other mineral oil related onshore industries have three months to file their applications from January to March, 2006. As with any large body of regulation, there are controversies over how the directive is being interpreted. There’s a tangle going on as to the timing of actions taken to comply with the permit system, with industry parties arguing that this should stretch beyond the 2007 deadline. There are disagreements between member states as to emissions monitoring. Some say an FCC’s emissions limits should be based on an hourly average emissions rate. That gives much less opportunity to manage peaks and troughs than an emissions limit based on the average over a day, or as some Member States are even calling for, the average over a year. “People have a lot of questions,” said another contractor. “They don’t know if they need to change a furnace here, or reduce fuel oil sulphur there,” he said. IPPC calls not only for emission limits. It also governs the technology choices available by prescribing the adoption of so-called Best Available Technology. The BAT yardstick must take into account the environmental sensitivity of the surroundings of the site. Furthermore, the financial impact of the technology options available to processors should not lead to job losses. And while it’s usually hard to find a bad word to say about high refining margins, in this particular case, the fact that margins are so high at a time when these Best Available Technologies are being scrutinised for cost effectiveness, may be a bit of bad luck. “It could mean that the rules mandate technology options that would have been out of the question two years ago when margins were low,” said a contributor to a member state technical guidance document. Ouch, sounds expensive. To summarise: Lots of big capital projects, lots of small capital projects, busy contractors and a whole lot of overworked chemical engineers. * Tim Lloyd Wright has edited refining publications, chaired international downstream meetings and reported for UK newspapers and BBC Radio. Today Tim combines freelance writing and talks (timlloydwright.com) with running a motivation and lifestyle business from Sweden (lifeplayers.com). | |||||||
Download Energy Industry Resumé with work samples Profile: Tim Lloyd Wright MA Here you'll find a brief profile of my work with international energy, transport and associated environmental issues. Energy trends articles You heard it here first: refinery CO2 storage a reality in Norway From the archive... Over-processed fuel leaves oil tankers adrift | ||||||||
| | | | | | | | |
