Petropiar Oil Refinery Wins 2008 Hart Plant of the Year

The Hart Communication Foundation (HCF) has announced that the PDVSA Petropiar oil refinery, located in Mejorador Jose, Barcelona, Venezuela, has been selected as recipient of the 2008 Hart Plant of the Year Award. The award is given annually to and end-user company to recognize the people, companies and plant sites around the globe that are using the capabilities of Hart Communication in real-time applications to improve operations, lower costs and increase availability.

The Hart Communication Protocol is included in 5,000 instruments associated with the plant’s control system. The company’s main goal was to implement predictive device diagnostics on all instrumentation. As a result, in the first four years in operation, Petropiar realized a reduction in pre-commissioning and commissioning time, improved process and device documentation and reduced loop check time by 60 percent, the HCF said. The use of Hart technology also allowed for a flawless start-up without a single failure attributed to instrumentation during this period, and the facility was able to eliminate 95 percent of the bad actors reported by its asset management application, the HCF announcement continued.

“Since our plant went on line in January 2004, Hart technology has opened a door of opportunity to the reliability community,” says Mariela León, Petropiar instrumentation reliability leader. “Using Hart, we were able to optimize our work process, creating a reduction of maintenance costs, which led to a 60 percent reduction of LPO (lost profit opportunity) caused by instrument faults. Eliminating bad actors and having the ability to reduce random failure has resulted in a reported reduction of LPO in the order of $70 million (USD) in two years.”

“Hart technology was initially used to pinpoint a bad valve positioner which provided the justification to change or add positioners to 400 valves,” adds Livia Lefebre, Petropiar reliability superintendent. “We demonstrated the Partial Valve Stroke application to management, who then approved its use—which significantly increased the time between required shutdowns.”