DATA MANAGEMENT: PETROCHEMICALS ➤
compared to a geographical map. Through this work, Ecopetrol is mapping the value of all its oil fi elds and incidentally, because it is a nationalised company, the value of the oil fi elds owned by the Colombian government. Ecopetrol joined the New York stock exchange in 2009; one of the prerequisites for doing so was to meet US Sarbanes- Oxley (SOXs) accounting laws. The LIMS was vital for gathering the data needed for this. ‘The LIMS added a lot of value to the company portfolio as a business,’ Díaz Vásquez says. ‘LIMS helped us quantify the value of our oil fi elds.’ This is diffi cult to do since the oil fi elds haven’t been tapped yet. In this respect, LIMS was more than just a mechanical product providing measurements and data; it added value to the company. The R&D site also conducts studies into improving production processes using a pilot plant, whereby data collected from the experimental plant setup is collected in LIMS for subsequent analysis. Electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs)
are also used within the R&D environment and Total Petrochemicals is using an enterprise ELN from IDBS to manage the data and intellectual property generated at its R&D centre in Feluy, Belgium. The research centre conducts studies around polymer chemistry and synthetic organic chemistry and IDBS’s E-WorkBook for Chemistry provides the scientists with the functionality to capture their work, as well as fi nd relevant information and run reports. Gabathuler at LabWare comments
that within research, in addition to the continued requirements for fl exibility and information sharing in platforms like LIMS and ELNs, there are trends to incorporate environmental data. Thurston, of Thermo Fisher Scientifi c, adds that with much more stringent environmental regulations, petrochemical organisations have to monitor the impact of their operations on the environment, which can be scheduled within the LIMS application. While petrochemical production and
R&D might have different requirements in terms of data management, with production putting emphasis on rapid turnaround while R&D is all about analysing test results, both rely on software platforms like LIMS for managing the data and effi cient operation.
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Staff at Ecopetrol (from left to right): Ezequiel Moreno Iturriago, EcoChemical engineer; Estewim Diaz Vasquez, technical leader, IT systems; Anyelo Ojeda Caicedo, functional leader, business
Formulation management
Depending on its intended use, oil is blended with a number of additives to maximise performance. Lubricant oil for car engines, for instance, is made up of a percentage of raw base oil blended with various different components, such as antioxidants and viscosity modifi ers among others. Infi neum, a manufacturer of petroleum additives, operates an R&D site in the UK, the work at which is focused around generating additive formulations. ‘A formulation is like a recipe,’ explains Alistair Sedwell, Europe applications leader at Infi neum UK. ‘Infi neum blends an additive package comprising different components depending on the specifi cations of the customers and OEMs.’ Infi neum’s R&D scientists rely on an informatics system called IRIS (Infi neum Research Information System), which is made up of four different platforms. IRIS is integrated with the CambridgeSoft ELN, which has been used to move from paper to electronic records. Infi neum is currently involved in a project to replace IRIS with LabVantage’s Sapphire LIMS. In terms of formulation management,
Infi neum is confi guring the formulation module available with Sapphire LIMS, which was initially designed for recipe management in the food industry. According to Sedwell, oil formulations are quite different to those used in the food industry. ‘One of the aspects of formulation management within petrochemicals that makes it more complicated is that a component in a formulation can actually be another formulation,’ he says. ‘Therefore,
SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2010
the system might need to explode down to the base components, whereas a recipe management system in the food industry, for example, wouldn’t need to do that. There exists another layer of complication in petrochemical formulations.’ LabVantage’s LIMS will be used to manage the data related to formulation management, inventory, handling test results including analytical tests as well as engine tests, and shipping of materials between different sites or to test laboratories. In addition to this, Sedwell wants the system to become a platform for future projects including advanced data mining and analysis, and further integration with other systems. Sedwell explains that, in general,
petrochemical R&D progresses from analytical tests to bench tests around viscosity or other variables, all the way to engine tests (running oil in a standard engine, which is then stripped down to get the results) and fi eld trials at the end of the R&D pipeline. ‘As you move along the pipeline the tests provide more data, it’s more complex and costs more money,’ he says. Infi neum is developing a high-performing reliable platform on which to further build its R&D capability. ‘One of the biggest issues from the users with IRIS is that, to do something simple such as register an R&D material and request a test on it, they had to log in to three or four different systems, whereas our project with LabVantage aims to deliver a single fully-integrated LIMS,’ Sedwell comments. ‘It’s considerably more effi cient from both a user and data management perspective.’
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