Production Balance: Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is the overall benefit of Honeywell’s Production Balance? A: The fundamental value of Production Balance is that it enables you to rigorously and impartially examine and validate the inventory and yield measurements used to make economic decisions about your plant. Benefits come in four main areas: Better detection and/or explanation of losses. Identification of faulty measurements. Relaxation of planning and physical constraints. Better tracking of Reagents/Catalysts/Fuels. Q: Can Production Balance be used in Oil & Gas facilities? A: Yes. Production Balance has been successfully deployed in Oil & Gas facilities. In more complex processes, such as LNG plants or Gas to Liquids plants, the statistical data reconciliation and yield accounting features provide significant value. In other parts of the supply chain, such as offshore production platforms, the production allocation solver can be used to back-allocate production volumes to the individual producing wells. SDR can then be used to validate allocated quantities before they are published. Q: Can Production Balance be used in Mining, Metals and Minerals? A: Yes. Production Balance has been successfully deployed in many MMM sites, including copper beneficiation, nickel concentrators, fertilizers and aluminum smelters. Production Balance’s ability to perform simultaneous component balances enables the total mass of ore, as well as the mass of individual components in the ore (metals and/or impurities), to be accurately tracked and validated. Q: What if a plant doesn't perform yield accounting at this level today? A: Production Balance helps you implement recognized Best Practices for production/yield accounting. Typically, plants that don’t perform any yield accounting cannot consistently and reliably answer questions about why they are, or why they are not, making money—unless the problems are on a very gross scale (i.e., unexpected shutdown). Such plants could be leaving millions of dollars in benefits on the table. Q: Can the operations department get value from Production Balance? A: Production Balance can perform automated data reconciliation, enabling reconciled balance information to be available on a shift basis, hourly basis—or even more frequently. By taking advantage of measurement redundancy, Production Balance can automatically calculate critical unmeasured flows and or qualities (including component percentages in mixes streams), which can enable operators to make more informed and more effective decisions.