PetroChina to modernize, optimize refineries

Staff -- Control Engineering, 4/1/2006

Beijing, China—The Asia-Pacific region's largest oil company, PetroChina Co., has selected Honeywell Inc. to implement a planning system project at 11 of its refining and petrochemical facilities throughout northern China. Honeywell will install an Advanced Planning System (APS) to help PetroChina optimize crude oil selection, production distribution, and plant production.

"Honeywell's APS system will have a widespread positive impact on our entire operation," said Gu Xuejing, deputy general manager, Department of Technology and Information, PetroChina Co. The APS program is part of PetroChina's IT Master Program, which aims to modernize PetroChina's operations of up-stream oil production and down-stream refining and petrochemical production.

Under the agreement, Honeywell will provide PetroChina with its Refinery and Petrochemical Modeling System (RPMS), a tool that prepares an optimal production plan for a processing plant or unit based on current inventories, raw material supply, and distribution of finished products. The RPMS modeling system includes advanced modeling capabilities that provide mixed integer programming, innovative property tracking techniques for multi-period models, fast recursions, and streamlined recursion property calculation techniques. With RPMS, planners can integrate all constraints that affect their plans, using data from a variety of sources, to quickly and accurately develop the optimal solution.