Description
Design, optimize, and troubleshoot refinery process units and equipment—such as crude/vacuum distillation, hydrotreating, catalytic cracking, reforming, and blending—to convert crude into fuels and feedstocks, applying chemical engineering principles to maximize yield, reliability, safety, energy efficiency, and regulatory compliance.
- • Develop and enforce operating and safety procedures for refinery units handling high pressures, temperatures, and hazardous chemicals.
- • Determine optimal sequencing and integration of operations such as crude/vacuum distillation, heat exchange, hydrotreating, cracking, reforming, and blending.
- • Prepare production, yield, and energy performance reports and cost estimates for management.
- • Direct unit startups, shutdowns, turnarounds, and debottlenecking efforts with operations, maintenance, and contractors.
- • Plan and interpret lab, pilot, or catalyst tests, crude assays, and blend studies prior to plant implementation.
- • Develop and optimize separation and conversion processes for refinery streams, including distillation, absorption/stripping, and reactor systems.
- • Conduct studies and unit trials to improve yields, product quality, energy efficiency, and reliability.
- • Define control strategies, alarm limits, trips, and instrumentation requirements for refinery units.
- • Design and plan equipment sizing and layout for columns, reactors, heat exchangers, and piping modifications.
- • Troubleshoot unit upsets, fouling, corrosion impacts, catalyst deactivation, and off-spec products.
- • Evaluate unit performance to optimize throughput, energy use, and emissions while ensuring process safety and environmental compliance.
- • Monitor and test unit performance across operating ranges, controlling variables such as temperature, pressure, flow, composition, sulfur, and octane/cetane.
- • Analyze process data, historian trends, reconciled mass and energy balances, and simulation results to identify bottlenecks and opportunities.
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Advanced Manufacturing
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O*NET occupational data (work activities, skills, knowledge).
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This site includes information from O*NET by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA), used under the CC BY 4.0 license. Career Clutch has modified some of this information for student readability. USDOL/ETA has not approved, endorsed, or tested these modifications. O*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA.
Last reviewed: Jan 2026
