Skip to content

Home » Learning Programme Directory » Oil, Gas & Energy » Refining

Refinery Economics and Optimisation Strategies

Who should attend: 

All those who have responsibility or involved in the following areas related to refineries as well as crude oil and petroleum products including:

  • Refinery planning
  • Refinery production, process, operations, project development, technical support engineering
  • Refinery business analysis, business performance analysis, business development
  • Refinery supply planning
  • Refinery management
  • Crude oil and petroleum products trading, sales and marketing
  • Finance, Investment Analysis & Appraisal, Bankers, Accountants, Economists, Risk Managers, Consultants, etc
  • Government, Regulatory and Development Agency officials
5 days
Course aims: 

This practical and comprehensive programme covers the economic and optimisation skills needed to maximize refinery efficiency and profit.

The programme will provide participants with an in-depth knowledge of the refinery processing systems and business, and how refinery raw materials, intermediate streams and products are produced, blended and valued. It will explain how planning, scheduling, supply, trading and investment evaluation fit into the refinery business process.

The programme will cover the fundamentals of linear programming, how to optimize using linear and successive programming. Particular attention is focused on the modern approaches and best practices to refinery optimization, including how to apply optimisation for planning, operation and debottlenecking.

Course outline: 
  • Refinery economic overview - macro economic outlook, historical overview, demand prospects, growth outlook, margin implications, product specifications outlook
  • Current and future state of affairs in the refining industry
  • Technical characteristics - review of petroleum products applications, characteristics and specifications. main refining process units. refining schemes. basic economics of the various process units.
  • Refinery margins and costs
  • Refinery simulation
  • Economic analysis for refining feeds, products for capital and operating costs.
  • Refining Processes - characteristics and features of major refining processes.
  • Modelling refinery processes
  • Modelling overall refinery operations
  • Modelling overall refinery flowsheets.
  • Current methods for refinery optimisation and their shortcomings.
  • Interactions of the key parameters between processes.
  • Hydrogen distribution network, models and interactions.
  • Opportunities for margin improvement from optimizing refinery unit operations
  • Improving unit/refinery reliability
  • Expanding refinery margins through energy conservation program
  • Reducing refinery losses
  • Overall refinery profit improvement program