Petroleum Refining Operations Field Handbook

A control-room operator watching a column upset develop does not have time to search through multiple manuals, vendor documents, and old training binders. Yet refinery knowledge is often scattered across exactly those sources.

This field handbook brings that knowledge together in one practical reference.

Written for refinery operators, trainees, engineers-in-training, and process and reliability engineers, it connects process calculations, unit operations, troubleshooting, inspection, and reliability in a format built for real field use.

Inside, you will:

• Work complete refinery calculations covering material and energy balances, distillation and yield, heat-exchanger duty, NPSH margin, and corrosion rate, with worked examples in US customary and SI units.
• Follow structured operating procedures for crude and vacuum distillation, FCC, hydrotreating and hydrocracking, catalytic reforming, alkylation and isomerization, delayed coking, sulfur recovery, and blending operations.
• Troubleshoot systematically by defining symptoms, ranking likely causes, and selecting diagnostic checks for rotating equipment, fired heaters, heat exchangers, and process upsets.
• Build practical inspection and reliability knowledge covering corrosion mechanisms, risk-based inspection, fitness-for-service basics, reliability-centered maintenance, FMEA, and turnaround planning.
• Learn from a recurring "Mistake Autopsy" in every chapter, showing realistic errors, why they occurred, and how they could have been caught sooner.
• Test your knowledge with Field Capstones and Practice Problems supported by answer keys showing intermediate calculations, not just final answers.

The handbook also includes technical appendices, conversion and physical-property tables, a process-calculation formula quick reference, a troubleshooting decision-tree reference, glossary, and full topic index for fast field lookup.

Use it as a training text, control-room reference, calculation refresher, onboarding resource, or practical guide when moving into an unfamiliar refinery unit.

Build the calculation fluency, procedural grounding, and troubleshooting judgment that refinery work depends on.