Reduction of Boiler Operational Cost in a Refinery Using Reliability Model: A Case Study of Port Harcourt Refinery

In this study, reduction of boiler operational cost in a refinery was performed using reliability model. The boiler system was selected for reliability modelling as it has significant impacts on the plant production performance. The failure mode effects and criticality analysis (FMECA) of the boiler system was examined, and a maintenance task was developed for the system. The exponential reliability method was employed to analyse the failure data collected from the maintenance logbook of Port Harcourt Refining Company to carry out reliability modeling on their boiler system for operational cost efficiency. Reliability centered maintenance (RCM) identified all the perspectives of failures in the boiler systems’ function and employed the appropriate maintenance approach for each failure respectively. Broad based results showed that the RCM had great impact on the preventive maintenance (PM) tasks. The Run-To-Failure (RTF) frequency was reduced. The result showed that by carrying out the proposed RCM labour planthe labour cost decreased from N169, 344, 000.00/year to N121, 872,000.00/year (approximately 28.03% of the total labour cost) and about 33.71% of the annual spare parts cost was saved with the proposed PM plan. “The downtime cost (DTC) of the plant boiler was investigated. The proposed PM task results indicated a saving of about 29% of the total annual downtime cost as compared with the current maintenance (RTF) plan.” The maintenance program applied in this study could be adopted by production firms to improve upon the reliability and operational cost of their production equipment.