Token of Appreciation

Safety Culture Reminder

IChemE 2nd regional safety seminar - Part I

I attended the above seminar on Monday, 14th July 2007. Interesting crowd, for once I felt that I was among my brethren of ChemEng.

I took some notes on the first presentation ‘PETRONAS - Enhancing chemical process safety in PETRONAS towards superior performance’ delivered by Kumar Karunakaran of Group Technical Services.

• Introduction to PETRONAS
• Introduction to Process Safety
• Process Safety Enhancements in PETRONAS
• Implementation approach
• Implementation of new Roles and Responsibilities
  • Champions
  • Focal Person
  • Process Safety Aspect Custodian
• The role of Situational Assessments (SA).
• Problem areas discovered during SAs.
  • Control of Safety Interlocks & Protective System Bypasses.
  • Inconsistent Lock Out Tag Out (LOTO) application when used on non-electrical equipment.
  • Insufficient Pressure Relief Devices (PRD) performance evaluation.
• Ensuring sustainability through monitoring and measurement
  • Establish Process Safety Community of Practice (CoP)
• Key success factors.
• Way forward.

Blue Spotted Stingray

Gas Prices - The Continuing Saga

News on the gas prices. Extracting from The Star:

From July 1, industries using more than two million cu ft of gas a day will enjoy a 70% discount on the market price of gas, now at RM79 per million British thermal unit (mmmbtu).

Under this new structure, industries using more than two million cu ft of gas a day will enjoy the new price of RM23.88 per mmmbtu, down from RM32.56 per mmmbtu, which was to have been effective this month.

Those using less than two million cu ft a day, including 8,887 households that have gas piped directly to their homes, will enjoy a price of RM22.06 per mmmbtu beginning Aug.

 I wonder if the Independent Power Producers (IPPs) had anything to do with this?

Barracuda Shoal

Prof Peng Plenary Lecture

I have finally managed to compress the video of this lecture. It’s 120MB, so take a healthy walk while waiting for the download.

You can download the file here.

Perils of Operational Shortcuts

I wanted to title this entry ‘Peril of Penelope Pitstop’ but couldn’t find the oil and gas spin. Lost opportunity or what?

Below is the result of a procedural shortcut, which was done without doing a JSA, Take-2, Step Back or any program where you think, analyse and plan before you act:

As if we don’t have enough public transport problems already…

In this case, no one was hurt. I’ve seen the (bloodless) aftermath of another non-oil and gas trained individual who took the same turn, but didn’t see a motorcycle coming up on his right.

Transferable Skills

As the price of oil continues upward, us in the industry might get all comfy and fuzzy. The higher the price, the more secure jobs in the oil and gas industry seem to be.

However, I would consider whether a general rise of cost of living would result in a slowdown of the oil and gas industry.If so, then perhaps you should look at the skills that you have, and see whether they can be transferred to another engineering line.

Let’s take me, for example. What skills would I like to strengthen to make me more marketable?

• Engineering skills: I need to keep my ChemEng knowledge and experience in other fields up to date. If I had a choice, I guess I would need to work on downstream processes, where ChemEng rules. Strippers, catalysts, crackers.
• The second best way is to work in upstream projects which use a lot of cross-industry processes. Membranes, glycol contactor systems, deprop and debutanisers. Knowing my way around simulation packages (and not getting into a ‘crap in, crap out’ situation) would be a serious advantage.
• Everyone needs good management skills. So, those project management muscles would need a workout. Try and get into a technical leadership role. The bigger the value of the project under you, the nicer your CV looks.
• Good networking skills are essential as well. I believe that Malaysia runs on contacts. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Isn’t that one of the 7 habits of highly effective people?
• If all fails, get a hobby which you enjoy, and think you may be able to commercialise. Blogging, professional diving… wait a minute, that’s me.

Anything else? Share your ideas, and give an old geezer like me job security.

Durban Boxing Shrimp

Saturday Star 08-07-12 - Job Opportunities

Another week, another scan of the Saturday Star newspaper. Here’s a list of job ads in the paper:

• Orogenic Resources is looking for a business development manager.
• Optimal is looking for a DCS engineer. Email and web prescence available. A lot of people moved to Optimal when it first started up, though I think the renumeration package isn’t as good nowadays. However, it’s still better than PETRONAS because Dow Chemicals is running interference.
• Ibn Zahn, a subsidiary of the Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC) is looking for a whole mess of process engineers. Apply via email here, or SMS to 017-2540204.

Happy hunting. Let me have some feedback if you find this list useful. Even better, spread the news. PayPal donations welcome.

Nostalgia - TCOT and OSC, Kerteh

Ah, the new signage for the Terengganu Crude Oil Terminal (TCOT) and Onshore Slug Catcher (OSC) are up.

IEM Blog - Where’s the Forum?

You may have noticed that the Institution of Engineers, IEM has started a blog page. Kudos to them for opening more channels of communication to its members, and engineers in general.

I hope they actually open a forum. A forum is more conductive to two way communication, and discussion between the different contributors. It’s designed to encourage dialogue between all parties involved in a topic, where as blog comments are not. And it will give the IEM a chance to create the first truly Malaysian engineering discussion group (excluding yours truly).

Maybe the IEM is afraid that forums will permit virtual discussion without increasing the actual physical presence of engineers at their events?

Me, I’m the Sec / Treas of the Oil, Gas and Mining Tech Division 2007-2008. If you are more comfortable in online participation, by all means, go ahead. Though I do hope to see you in the Bangunan Ingenier sometime.

Offshore Septic Systems - Design Thoughts

Different assets have varied approaches to the disposal of human waste products . The ones I am familiar with have all products are disposed of directly into the sea via a caisson / pile. Makes for a real simple design. Though, even then you can get it wrong:

• Tieing the individual septic piping together above the caisson level. That’s a good way of giving a downstairs user a scare (and a septic shower) when a higher user flushes to dispose of waste.
• Tieing in the septic piping into process drain piping. That could cause backflow of any evolved gas from the drains into your toilets. In the old days, this has caused accidents initiated by smoking customers. And smells up the process area.
• Designing too short the septic caisson / pile . It’s supposed to discharge below sea level, people! You might have a voyeuristic streak, but watching other people’s disposal products get dropped above you while you are working on the lowest deck (sea deck in my parlance) does not a happy camper make. Esp. if you are down wind.

I have worked on a project that required a full septic system. There was a bit of head scratching there. First time I thought of picking up a civil engineering book. Concept’s easy, have a tank to ferment solid products, send the water to the sea. But who does the septic tank cleaning? Indah Water?

Batfish Racha Yai Phuket