HYDROCARBON
ENGINEERING
82
Mastering a complicated dance
With those numbers in mind, it is impressive that, at such a
critical point in the transference of such volatile
materials – chiefly to and from tankers – terminals and their
operations play so minor a role in these accidents. It is here,
at many terminals, that a complicated dance and
coordination of piping systems take place, delivering
commodities to and from a limited number of loading
stations, to and from the specific storage tanks that need to
be charged, or from which finished products need to be
exported.
In looking at the logistics of any terminal, it is obvious that
efficiency and logistics would not allow each tank to have its
own fill and delivery line to be linked to its own tanker
loading station. That would mean that in a 40 tank farm, 80 fill
or delivery lines with associated valves and loading
infrastructure would be required. Efficiency and common
sense demand a better way.
One of the most overlooked and impressive features of a
tank facility are the bulk storage manifold stations. These
manifold stations stand in stark contrast to the relatively
simple storage tanks, whose job is to buffer the demands of
the plant and the egress of finish commodities to their next
stage of use or refinement. Through a relatively complicated
switching system, their tens of pumps, hundreds of valves and
thousands of feet of pipe save many, many multiples of
materials that would be needed to deliver products to and
from offloading safely, efficiently and effectively.
Case study
MUC Oil & Gas Engineering Consultancy is a multi-discipline
engineering consultancy firm providing consultancy services in
engineering, project management, specialised engineering
studies and analyses, and safety and environmental
engineering for the oil and gas and allied industries. MUC has
60 employees, with headquarters in Sharjah, UAE, plus three
branch offices in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Fujairah.
Fast schedule for petroleum storage terminal
project
To help meet growing demand in the developing trading hub
of Fujairah, UAE, a storage facility project is underway. The
SOCAR AURORA Fujairah Terminal FZE project is a joint
venture of the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR),
Aurora Progress SA, the Swiss-based commodity trading
house, and the Government of Fujairah.
The terminal is designed to store 640 000 m
3
of a range of
white and black petroleum products. The state of the art
facility includes storage tanks, a ship loading and discharge
facility, a truck loading facility, and a blending facility.
MUC was chosen to provide the following services for the
project:
n
Front end engineering and design (FEED).
n
Environmental impact assessment.
n
Tender administration and management – project
management consultancy.
The company needed to perform the engineering design
of the petroleum product storage terminals with world class
quality within a limited budget and time. MUC needed to
deliver a sustainable quality and safe storage terminal FEED
within just one month at a reasonable cost.
Cutting delivery time
There were a number of major factors that influenced MUC in
selecting its software solutions to perform the project. The
company was already using AutoCAD, so it wanted to minimise
the training time required for its AutoCAD-based designers.
MUC wanted a cost effective solution with minimal hardware
required for deployment. Finally, the solution needed to be
interoperable with the company’s other applications.
MUC chose a variety of solutions to perform the project.
Mechanical and piping engineers and designers used
Intergraph CADWorx Plant Professional for the terminal
equipment and piping design. Intergraph CAESAR II was
deployed by MUC’s piping stress engineers for piping stress
analysis.
Process engineers and designers used CADWorx P&ID
Professional to create the piping and instrumentation
diagrams and process flow diagrams for the terminal. MUC
also used Advanced Flow Technology (AFT) Fathom for its
hydraulics studies along with Paulin Research Group (PRG)
FE/Pipe for piping finite element analysis.
The competitive edge
MUC experienced integration between the software products.
The CADWorx Plant Design Suite operated on AutoCAD with
seamless integration. CAESAR II also worked smoothly with
PRG FE/Pipe.
Figure 3.
Employee at work.
Figure 4.
The CADWorx Plant Design Suite provides
drawing and database connectivity, and 3D modelling
utilities.
