Oil Refinery Production Model
Purpose: get Engineers & Scientists thinking outside their box ... think -large- problems. What's possible today vs. needs for tomorrow?
Goal for this page: get top level management, engineers, & scientists thinking outside-the-box!
Minimize Expenses: What do you see in the above Car Assembly Line? See any unused assets sitting on the sidelines that cost the owner tons of money? Edward Deming, author of Statistical Process Control, taught Japan car manufacturing companies ways to minimize expenses in order to minimize prices of new cars.
This assembly line shows several car doors stacked on the side of a main car assembly line; as was common with US car manufacturing companies in the 1900s. Deming showed Japan companies how to reduce their 'stack' to less than one! Minimizing overhead! Japan companies have one door come to each assembly point 30 minutes before time to assemble. Plus, it fits and no need for other backups in case it doesn't fit. US companies need several backups because they know their doors probably won't fit right.
Question 2: Are you interested in increasing your sales income by several orders of magnitude? Are you willing to think outside-the-box? If so, please read on. This is a large proposal, the size of NASA's Apollo Space program back in the early 1960s.
A new level of Computers and Software will be required for this Oil Production proposal. Today's Computers are Algebraic, i.e. bare bones, conceived designs that run similar to a 'model T' car. They 'run' along at a '30 mph' clip. We need fast super Computers like the Wright Brothers 'Airplane' that can run at a '3,000 mph' clip. These super Computers need 'Automatic Differentiation' based technologies; i.e. smart thinking abilities. NASA realized this when starting the Apollo space program; spent tons to get it and put us on the moon.
Oil production depends on many factors; e.g. Supply, Demand, present inventory, etc. An oil company may have many refineries with many distillation units. How can a company simulate extracting products 'a', 'b', and 'c' from its crude oil? Assume the company wants product 'a' on the west coast, 'b' in the middle of US, and 'c' on the east coast. Assume the company has refineries 'x' on west coast, 'y' in middle US, and 'z' on east coast. How does one model such a company's oil production so as to produce/refine the 'right' amounts of each product at each refinery site in order to meet the company's goal of maximizing profits?
Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) will be used to model the crude oil distillation for each distillation unit at each site; i.e. many PDEs must be solved at once! Are there computers large enough to handle such problems today? Are there plans for some super computer that will be able to handle many (1,000s) PDEs at once?
With maintenance of distillation units being continual, e.g. fix one, stop another, this will be a constant problem when trying to simulate the next day's crude oil work load. For example, assume a company has 600 distillation units overall. That means a computer program would be required to solve 600 PDEs ASAP; i.e. 10 hours of PDEs. My past experience with modeling in FortranCalculus™ language/compiler, I was taught that a modeling would require 'Tmod' time to execute the model, would require around 2 x 'Tmod' time for the optimal solution. That would then get us into the 20 hr. time range for 600 PDEs. Too long! Need faster computers and solvers to get into reasonable solution times. Ideas how this could be done today?
Many people thought that the Wright Brother's idea of an 'airplane' would never fly. But, what if it did? What if Oil sales income doubled or more? Would crude oil prices increase? (Everyone is going to want more for their piece of the pie, right?) How would this effect your company?
John D Rockefeller was quoted saying, "If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success."
Any future John D Rockefeller's reading this proposal? Are you interested in increasing your company profits by several orders of magnitude? Does your company have a company goal or objective that all employees know about and follow? If so, continue reading on this proposal by reading my article "Company Goal: Increase Productivity?" (a dozen pages). Go to the web page and click on the 'download' link, its free!
The next article will show a Oil Production model as an example problem for industry to solve.
