Users Conference 2005

The Corporate Deployment for Sigmafine at Petrobras' 11 Refineries

Petrobras started in 2001 a program to make available a mass balance system in all its 11 Brazilian refineries. Sigmafine is the licensed software and SOTEICA is the Consultant Company doing the implementation of it. The main goals of such program are to calculate the oil loss KPI and improve the quality of the Company production accountability. After a period when the project lagged due to lack of labor force, some refineries decided to hire SOTEICA to run Sigmafine and achieve the data reconciliation and mass balance calculations. Afterwards, the program took off and useful results became available, causing other refineries to speed up their own projects. Presently, five refineries have the Sigmafine system operational and three are running it daily.

Sigmafine results make production accountability easier allowing the task to be accomplished in 1h most of the days. Presently, reconciled data are used as the source to fill in missing information in the Corporate Database, instead of prospecting it manually from PI.

One remarkable finding was a leak through a faulty valve from a tank of diesel into a tank of LCO. Diesel was being degraded to fuel oil diluent. This loss was equivalent to US$ 6MM/year. The recurrent presence of the node in the gross error report allowed the discovery.

Several reports were built using reconciled data besides the determination of yields. The IP mass balance report was developed. Clearly the report shows that individual oil loss models of the major non-measured losses sources are required if we aim trustworthy losses evaluation.

An own fuel consumption report was developed. Reconciled data of the fuel oil system have better quality and allowed better energy consumption follow up.

Reconciled data of run tests were also used in the unit rigorous model parameter evaluation.

Company
Petrobras

Speaker
Oscar Rotava

Company
Petrobras

Speaker
Oswaldo Luis Carrapico