Valero Energy Corporation: Summer 2013
Company: Valero Energy Corporation
Location: Houston, Texas
Facility Type: Refinery
Department: Tech Services (Process Engineering)
Title: Intern
Location: Houston, Texas
Facility Type: Refinery
Department: Tech Services (Process Engineering)
Title: Intern
Valero Energy Corporation (NYSE: VLO) is headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, and is the world's largest independent refiner of crude oil. They operate primarily in the United States, though they also have refineries in Canada and the United Kingdom. My internship took place at their Houston refinery, in the Process Engineering department. As a process engineer, I learned how to support and optimize day-to-day operations, as well as how to develop meaningful projects that will further improve the refinery as a whole.
Please look through my End of Term Presentation, as it describes each project that I completed from a more technical perspective. In this brief review of my time at Valero, I would like to point out the two major accomplishments from my summer internship.
1. Learn Flows and Fundamentals
Every oil refinery has basically the same components, so my experience in a refinery gave me the opportunity to learn all the major units that exist in most refineries. In general, crude oil enters the refinery through the crude unit, where it is separated into different components based upon the different boiling points of the components that are mixed throughout the crude feedstock. After the components are split, all the units in the refinery, including the catalytic cracker, hydrotreaters, coker, and alkylation unit among others transform the random crude components into a mixture of hydrocarbons that will be most useful to consumers.
Each week during the summer, the process engineer in charge of each unit gave a lecture to the interns and new hire engineers. These lectures were aimed at teaching us the purpose of the units, the technical basis behind the processes, and the controls and any practical information that the experienced engineers want to pass on to us. The Houston refinery was the only Valero location that had a structured lecture program for the interns, and as one inexperienced with the oil industry, I learned the basics much faster than I could have if I had only worked on projects.
2. Complete Meaningful Projects
My projects allowed me to engage with departments outside the process engineering department, which was much more of a challenge in a facility that employed around 500 people, compared to my former location at Cargill where I knew nearly every person on site by name. It took a lot of effort to complete projects in a short time frame because of the number of people involved. The best example of this was in the test run of the depentanizer that I co-led. The project involved sampling, which was coordinated with the lab, and changes to the controls over the course of two days, which involved the operations teams on multiple units to understand and respond to the changes of the test run. My responsibility in the project was to create a set of instructions that the operations team would follow. I decided what samples needed to be tested. I also created a simulation to help predict and interpret the results. However, though I was responsible for the technical aspects of the run, I relied heavily on other departments and grew in my teamwork and leadership skills in ways that I cannot in the academic world.
Please look through my End of Term Presentation, as it describes each project that I completed from a more technical perspective. In this brief review of my time at Valero, I would like to point out the two major accomplishments from my summer internship.
1. Learn Flows and Fundamentals
Every oil refinery has basically the same components, so my experience in a refinery gave me the opportunity to learn all the major units that exist in most refineries. In general, crude oil enters the refinery through the crude unit, where it is separated into different components based upon the different boiling points of the components that are mixed throughout the crude feedstock. After the components are split, all the units in the refinery, including the catalytic cracker, hydrotreaters, coker, and alkylation unit among others transform the random crude components into a mixture of hydrocarbons that will be most useful to consumers.
Each week during the summer, the process engineer in charge of each unit gave a lecture to the interns and new hire engineers. These lectures were aimed at teaching us the purpose of the units, the technical basis behind the processes, and the controls and any practical information that the experienced engineers want to pass on to us. The Houston refinery was the only Valero location that had a structured lecture program for the interns, and as one inexperienced with the oil industry, I learned the basics much faster than I could have if I had only worked on projects.
2. Complete Meaningful Projects
My projects allowed me to engage with departments outside the process engineering department, which was much more of a challenge in a facility that employed around 500 people, compared to my former location at Cargill where I knew nearly every person on site by name. It took a lot of effort to complete projects in a short time frame because of the number of people involved. The best example of this was in the test run of the depentanizer that I co-led. The project involved sampling, which was coordinated with the lab, and changes to the controls over the course of two days, which involved the operations teams on multiple units to understand and respond to the changes of the test run. My responsibility in the project was to create a set of instructions that the operations team would follow. I decided what samples needed to be tested. I also created a simulation to help predict and interpret the results. However, though I was responsible for the technical aspects of the run, I relied heavily on other departments and grew in my teamwork and leadership skills in ways that I cannot in the academic world.