Water Conservation Effort
The Toledo Refinery created a Water Source Control Team during 2004 to focus on reducing the amount of fresh water the refinery uses. The Team directed their attention to looking for different methods and means to reduce unnecessary water usage, including actions such as modification of the water line leak repair prioritization process. Additionally, the refinery focused on optimization of opportunities for heat exchanger cleaning. Heat exchanger data is tracked enabling exchangers in need of cleaning to be done as process unit shutdowns present themselves. Cleaning the heat exchangers enables improved heat transfer – i.e., better cooling – which in turn allows for less water to be used in the cooling process.

These efforts helped contribute to the Toledo Refinery’s 12.8% reduction in aggregate water usage and 16.6% reduction on a normalized basis (based on barrels of crude throughput) in 2005, when compared with 2004.