Graduate Program at Oil Refinery - Preparation
I have an interview coming up with an oil refinery (think Valero) and wanted to know what you guys would recommend looking at to prepare. I know I’ll be speaking to both their crude and refined products guys at the shop.
Understand the basics of how a refinery makes a decision to optimize crude slates for product yields. Look up what a refinery LP is. Get an idea of what the purpose of different refinery technologies are and how unit outages change decisions.
Not OP but also have a similar interview coming up. What resources would you recommend for looking into this information? Just straight Google?
Googling is always a good start. There is also a book called Petroleum Refining in Non Technical language which is used widely in the industry
I am assuming the second part answers the first as Linear Programming optimizes a given element like revenue, costs, or margins when fed certain constraints. So a refinery LP will take into account the operational constraints / abilities of the plant and inputted customer demand and prices for refined products as well as the crude slate / mix that is available and can be best processed. Transportation to and from the plant is also accounted for in the costs equation. Using this information, product yields can be optimized according to customer demand for refined products. Is this in the right direction?
I understand refineries in terms of distilling, cracking, reforming, treating, and blending seeing the use of distillation units and catalytic cracking / reforming to yield valuable finished products. I was wondering which specific refinery technologies I should really look into to be prepared as I see there are several components - basically like an entire city.
Unit outages are both unplanned and planned with the latter being accounted for as yearly maintenance in the first quarter and the fall due to lower demand during these times. Unplanned outages as I understood offer arbitrage opportunities for traders if a locational spread is able to materialize and provide an opportunity for unaffected refineries - more reliable ones - to take advantage of improved margins. My question is how do unplanned outages affect the decision calculus for affected refineries?
Yep, you’re on the right track when thinking about asset optimization. Know how the units affect both inputs and outputs. For example, a reformer handles light ends and allows more light crudes to be inputted and creates gasoline blending components. And then understand what happens when that unit is down, how the inputs and outputs change.
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