Sinclair Refinery Wyoming, USA welcomed LOTOS Asfalt Refinery from Gdansk, Poland to tour their refinery. Coking.com Inc., a part of Refining Community, made the arrangements. LOTOS is designing and building a Delayed Coker Unit to process heavy crude oil into fuels and petroleum coke. Evan Hyde, the Director of Field Services, and Gary Pitman, the President, have been working closely with LOTOS and their EPC’s during the design phase to offer independent consultation. Both Gary and Evan have vast experience, having worked with 106 Cokers around the world.
Ryan Schoel, the Coker Unit Supervisor at Sinclair, assisted by various team members, lead the tour through all functions of the coker process, explaining daily operations and equipment reliability issues. Six technicians participated in the 4 days of training and demonstration. When working with extreme temperatures and pressures, it is very reassuring to have an experienced coach demonstrate how things works. On the final day, five executives from LOTOS lead by CEO Piotr Przyborowski, received overview training, a tour of the coker unit, and a meeting with multiple managers from Sinclair Refinery including: Steve Sondergard (Refinery Manager), Jim Lewis (East Area Manager), and Ray Hansen (Technical Manager). The knowledge gained by LOTOS will help them avoid some potential risks and implement some necessary adjustments in their project as well as prepare them better for the operations and maintenance.
The Sinclair Refinery benefited from a similar arrangement several years ago. Coking.com facilitated a tour for them of a working production unit at the LyondellBasell Houston Refinery. They participated in a week of training which helped immensely before starting up their own coker unit. Sinclair has a strong commitment to the world wide coker community.
Coking.com is part of Refining Community which offers consulting and training for Delayed Cokers, Fluid Catalytic Cracking, Sulfur Recovery and Instrumentation & Electrical. They host RefComm® a conference and exhibition every May in Galveston, Texas. Coking.com welcomes LOTOS to join Sinclair in the worldwide Coker Community!