Caltex’s magazine for employees, franchisees & resellers
Issue 44 Aug – Sep 08
Article Highlights
The program was a success. Caltex now get calls from our trained noses in the village pointing out certain odours which is helping identify sources more quickly and mitigate operational issues.
Focus
Better awareness the best outcome
From Caltex Refining’s point of view one of the best results of the odour audit was the raising of awareness among personnel of the impact odours have on the community and how important it is to prevent their emission. The issue is being communicated at daily production meetings and during shutdowns.
Such progress was clear in the Kurnell refineries’ latest annual report to the New South Wales Department of Environment and Climate Change. The report showed a 52 per cent reduction in the number of odour complaints compared with the previous year. It was the lowest number of complaints recorded since 2001/2002.
Gallery
Odour-audit team members Trevor Davis, Harden Erskine and Susan Davis
In this issue:
Clearing the air at Kurnell
Members of the Kurnell leak-detection team Jonathan Olup, Jerry Yin and Daniel Li hard at work keeping odours in check.
Australia needs a level playing field for carbon emissions from oil refineries! That’s the message from Caltex in response to the government’s green paper on an Australian greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme, which will start in 2010.
“The audit was a most interesting process,” says Susan who, with 12 other villagers including Trevor and members of Caltex’s Environment Protection Group (EPG), lent their noses in an exercise to help local people identify refinery-related smells. It was part of Caltex’s ongoing efforts to reduce its environmental impact and ensure its employees were better informed about odour emissions and how to tackle them.
“The audit was a good opportunity to reach out to the community and a good learning experience,” says Harden Erskine, Area Shift Manager at the Oil Movement Centre at Kurnell and one of the managers who responds to community complaints.
What exactly is an odour audit? It’s a process that started at the Odour Research Laboratories Australia in the Sydney suburb of Newington. The villagers – all volunteers – and six EPG members were assessed here to determine their sensitivity to smells.
In a six-hour session they underwent odour sensitivity and recognition training. They were presented with the standard “odorant” for such an exercise: n-butanol. They also sniffed three “sample” refinery odours taken from the biggest sources of smells, the oily water separators and two of the biggest stacks.
This helped “educate” the participating noses. The next step was to put their odour detection skills to work in an audit of the refinery.
Finding the culprits
After inductions at the refinery, the residents took part in five audits. These took up to six hours each and involved walking around the streets of the refinery and neighbouring village. When they detected a smell, they stopped and wrote down the characteristics. Then in the refinery they tried to find the source.
The odours included rotten eggs, sulfur, oil, petrol and kerosene, some of which the audit teams could relate to sources. They varied in strength and not all were considered sufficiently strong or offensive for a volunteer to initiate a call to the refineries Community Concerns Hotline.
Most residents accept they live next door to a refinery, but expect Caltex to do what it can to minimise its impact
The residents identified the most significant source as the refineries’ oily water separators which are part of the wastewater treatment plant. “The separators typically have oil odours and a smell like rotten eggs,” explains refinery environmental engineer Emily Rowe. The egg smell is caused by H2S, a gas that can be produced in the refining process. It is easily detected by human noses at very low concentrations.
This was good news as the refinery was already designing new covers for the separator bays with new air ducting facilities to more effectively prevent odour release.
The refinery is now implementing a number of projects to ensure other odour sources are minimised. The old LPG odorant dosing facility has been replaced with a newer facility with better odour controls. A program for detecting volatile organic compounds emissions and initiating repairs is in its second year, having reduced emissions to air to a tenth of what they were previously estimated to be.
The refinery has also changed day-to-day operations to make odour prevention a key factor in how units are operated, shut down and started up.
“The program was a success,” says Emily. “We now get calls from our trained noses in the village pointing out certain odours. It’s helping us identify sources more quickly and mitigate operational issues. For example, earlier in 2008 we had a major shutdown of Area 3 plant and the process was completed without one odour complaint.”
Most residents aren’t hostile, adds Harden Erskine. They accept they live next door to a refinery, but do expect Caltex to do what it can to minimise its impact. “It’s not perfect but we are trying,” he says.
It’s getting better
“The situation has got a bit better and Caltex have tried to improve things,” says Susan Davis, who lives in Captain Cook Drive close to the refinery boundary. “Like other residents we get most offended when the odours come into the house and we can’t get away from them.”
To the community volunteers Caltex offered thanks and more. In exchange for their time the refinery made a donation to charities of their choice. The company paid $7,500 in total to nine charities