Customer: IPLOM
Task: Studies & Software
End User: IPLOM Refinery
Location: Busalla (Italy)
Period: 1989- 2023

In the late eighties, the 1.5 MTY Busalla refinery started a long-term cooperation with Prometheus to improve the refinery profitability to cope with the difficult financial situation. Prometheus provided technical assistance and realised feasibility and process studies. After five years, the assistance contract was finished because the refinery had built the internal competencies to manage the operation successfully.

In this context, Prometheus delivered the following studies:

• Vacuum Unit Revamping (1989): Capacity Improvement; Thermal integration; Temperate water circuit revamp.
• Revamping CDU Phase 1 (1992): Capacity Improvement; Energy saving.
• Revamping CDU Phase 2 (1994): Pre-flash insertion (one overhead drum for two columns); Preheat train split to increase cycle length (maintenance of critical exchangers with unit running).
• Basic Design of the New Sour Water Stripper Unit (1994): Replacement of the existing unit with a new one with increased capacity.
• Process innovations to face new European specifications (feasibility study) (1998).

The cooperation restarted in 2018 when IPLOM adopted the software CUTS as a crude characterisation tool to provide data to the planning and scheduling tools. The implementation of this software required specific customisations to integrate perfectly with the refinery applications, which had been developed considering another Crude characterisation tool.

In 2022 IPLOM entrusted Prometheus with data analytics studies to build inferential data models useful to estimate in real-time process variables not directly measurable.