OMS eLearning Academy conducted a one-day training course on Blend Optimization for Phillips66 at their Houston corporate office. 35 professionals from Phillips’ 13 refineries attended the Blend Optimization training. The attendees included blend engineers/scheduler, lab staff, planners, operational managers and Blend SME’s. The training was a grand success and was rated 4.6/5 by all attendees.
The training focused on the Blend Optimization methodology and how to minimize quality giveaways by using blend offline optimizer. The course started with an overview of MCOR (Manage, Control, Optimize and Reconcile), blend mathematical formulation using first principles and built on optimization algorithms and analysis of results. The course used a generic offline optimizer, which was fully functional for multi-blends, multi-periods blend planning, for live demo and demonstrated the use of marginal values analysis to convert from infeasibility to feasible blend optimized solution.
The Blend Optimization Training Topics were
- The Road Map to MCOR of Refinery Offsite Operations
- Blending Problems and Challenges
- The Quality giveaway – Concept, Cost and reduction Benefits
- Blending Definition and Formulation
- Blend Optimization
- Blend Models
- Methods to Handle Blend Non-linearity
- Regression and feedback of Blend Model Parameters
- Tanks Quality Analysis, Measurement and Prediction
- Bench marking of Fuels Blending System
- Overview of an offline Blending Optimizer System
- Demonstration of An Offline Blend Optimizer System
- Discussion of Results-Marginal Values Analysis
- Why Blending Projects fail?
- An overview of OMS eLearning Academy
The oil and gas training topics were very useful for professionals with less than 2 years’ experience and also served as review for more seasoned professionals. It was quite interactive course and attendees participated in the question and answers session at the end. All attendees received a certificate of completion . As one of the suggestions from the attendees, OMS eLearning academy plans to make this course as one of the special eLearning curriculum in the near future.
Some of the testimonials from the attendees were as follows:
“Good addition to “F2F”. Thanks”
“Course contained a lot of foundation/basic information relative to my experience level. Seems to be a good course for people with less experience.”
“I liked how the challenges of blending were discussed and importance of understanding models and importance of blend header.”
“Overall, very useful course”
“Overall useful reminders probably best for < 2 years on the job”
“It would be nice to see how the P66 refineries were rated on the bench-marking system.”
“Good overview of everything. It was easy to understand as a new engineer.”