Case Study: Oil Refinery

No More Missing Crude: How Subatix found barrel leakage and turned it into throughput

Client

Independent 80kbd refinery with focus on CDU/VDU and hydrotreaters operations

Outcome

Total Indicative Financial Outcome

$7-8M/yr in rate uplift only; plus, energy savings & off-spec avoidance

Why they decided to try Subatix?

The Challenge

Shareholders set targets and triggered need to find leaking barrels

The Gap

Ops team didn't have enough capacity and capabilities to build a clear perspective on improvement opportunities and what to go after first

The Need

They wanted data-backed picture of their operations and how it can be improved

The Solution

With Subatix ops team build solid baseline, identified leaking barrels and designed a plan to capture them

What we did, in 4 weeks

/01Built the fact base: Benchmarked CDU/VDU and key interfaces against 250+ internal peak windows, mapped 130+ cross-unit linkages, and quantified improvement potential

/02Configured Subatix to site realities (tags, limits, operating regimes) and onboarded the operations team

/03With Subatix, the team worked through 35+ primary root causes and assembled a proof-backed opportunity pack covering >75% of the initial improvement potential + 20-30 root causes were marked for further analysis

What we found

Throughput uplift (stream-day basis)

+4.18 kb/d

Two-phase utilization lift from 90.9% (~74.54 kb/d) → 93.7% (~76.83 kb/d) → 96.0% (~78.72 kb/d) = +4.18 kb/d total.

Quality (desalter)

Salts: 11.9 → ≤6.2 ptb | Chlorides: 8.8 → ≤4.7 ppm

Targeting ≥95% hours in-spec via online analyzers, alarm bands, and SOP discipline.

Stability (make high-rate days stick)

Daily crude CV: 15–20% → ≤5–7%

By coordinating combustion & column ΔT (stabilize 8–12°F → ≤3–4°F) and lifting APC on-hours ≥85%.

Energy (refinery-native)

EII: −3 to −5 points | SFC: −3–5%

≈ heater efficiency +3–5 pp via advanced combustion control, excess-air management, and heat-integration tuning.

Reliability

On-stream: +3–5 pp | Unplanned downtime: −30–40%

To support sustained higher utilization.

Result

Subatix delivered a Single-Source of Trust validated improvement opportunity backlog backed by ops logs and an operations intelligence workspace to build improvement initiatives. Early actions are already lifting throughput to capture additional barrels.