Refining NZ is New Zealand's only oil refinery and the leading supplier of refined petroleum products to the New Zealand market, including gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and other products. It supplies most of the fuel needs for Auckland through a 169 kilometre (105 mile) long, 273 millimetre (10.75 inch) diameter pipeline terminating at the Wiri Terminal in South Auckland.
To meet the growing demand for jet fuel, Refining NZ started a pipeline capacity increase project in 2017. The first 2 of 3 phases of this project have been completed with the 3rd phase due to kick-off in 2019.
Refining NZ rely on an Online Real-Time Transient Modelling (RTTM) system to provide decision support applications for the pipeline controllers such as batch tracking, scraper tracking and leak detection. The RTTM was updated in 2017 to include the changes made in the pipeline operation.
On September 14th, 2017, Refining NZ experienced a significant incident on the pipeline which threatened their business.
This paper details how Refining NZ use their RTTM as a decision support tool, some key learnings from the incident, including analysis of the incident using the RTTM, and what Refining NZ has done to improve its operations as a result of the incident and the subsequent analysis.