HMEL picks IBM as partner for Bhatinda refinery

IBM today announced that HPCL- Mittal Energy Limited (HMEL), a joint venture between Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited and Mittal Energy Investments Pte Ltd, Singapore, a Lakshmi N Mittal Group Company, has selected IBM as its strategic partner in the design and implementation of a state-of-the-art Manufacturing Execution System (MES) for their zero residue refinery.

HMEL is investing more than $4 billion to build the green refinery, which will be able to process 180,000 barrels of crude oil per day. Located in Bathinda, Punjab, the energy efficient, environment-friendly, high distillate yielding complex refinery on commissioning shall produce clean fuels and polypropylene by processing all types of crudes.

Being a new venture, HMEL needed business processes and applications to commission and operate the grass-roots refinery and allied facilities. HMEL’s endeavour is to have processes built around leading practices and implemented on best-in-class applications. It selected IBM as its strategic MES partner to design the processes for manufacturing, select the applications and manage the implementation of the packages and build a common integration and reporting framework.

Through the 1.5 year, multi-million dollar agreement with a single, unified view of business operations and access to real-time information across all systems will help HMEL operate the new refinery with maximum efficiency and return on investments, and improve decision making in such areas as energy and quality management, planning and scheduling, trade and risk management, and physical security.

“It is critical for HMEL to establish processes that help the company get a single, comprehensive view of its operations and also bring in greater efficiency into the system,” said Richard Dirckx, vice-president (operations), HMEL. “IBM understood our needs and has the global expertise, knowledge repositories of leading practices, processes and key performance indicators to support our goal of becoming one of the smartest refineries in the world. In fact, HMEL will be among only a handful of refineries to start operations with the full suite of MES applications.”

The best-in-class applications supporting the new refinery will be integrated using the IBM Chemical and Petroleum Integrated Information Framework, a technology platform based on open industry standards that will bring together advanced information management, analytic and process integration software from IBM and other suppliers. HMEL will use business intelligence and performance management software, including performance dashboards, to monitor performance, set targets, and optimise resources.