Refinery Technologist
I had actually applied for jobs towards the end of my BSc
in what is called the "milk round". Major employers
would come to the universities giving first interviews based
on an initial screening of CVs. I was made a job offer by Shell,
which I turned down in favour of doing a PhD. They just said
the job offer would be waiting for me when I had finished. So
I started work for Shell at the age of 25 at Shell Haven refinery
on the north bank of the Thames estuary near Canvey Island as
a Refinery Technologist.
An oil refinery takes crude oil, which has come from the North
Sea, or elsewhere, and turns this into useful products such as
LPG, petrol, kerosene, diesel, and fuel oil. It does this by
taking the oil and splitting it into a number of boiling fractions.
These fractions are then processed using catalysts, and blended
to turn them into products. The scale of the plants that do this
is impressive. For example, you probably have a central heating
boiler in your house. On refinery, when we heat things up we
use a boiler the size of your house.
I spent eight years working at Shell Haven in a variety of
posts which included:
 | Introducing computerised supervision of the process plant
performance,
| Shutting down and demolishing an old part of the site,
| Designing a £6,000,000 (1980 money) extension to an
existing plant,
| Providing technical advice on plant operations,
| Justification and purchase of the first IBM PC at the refinery
(and one of the first in Shell)
| Responsibility for environmental matters at the refinery,
| Responsibility for the development and operation of a range
of computer systems supporting engineering activities.
| | | | | | |
During my time there I gained membership of the Institution
of Chemical Engineers. I also studied for a Diploma in Management
Studies, and qualified as a Member of the Institute of Management.
Work - Computing
Both at university and during my work as a Chemical Engineer
I had been involved with computers as tools. Eventually I concluded
that I was better at the computing side of things than most of
the people who were supposed to be doing that as their main job,
and so I decided to switch track. However, I didn't get involved
in writing programs, or in computer operations, but in what they
operate on - information. I became interested in information
management, and in particular data models. A data model tells
you what the data in a database means, with respect to the world
the data represents i.e. it is a language for data.
It turns out that whilst it is relatively easy to create a
data model to do something specific for one, or a small group
of people, when lots of people do this for lots of databases
they create different data models (= different languages). Not
surprisingly these systems then have difficulty talking to each
other, because they don't speak the same language. Building translators
is very expensive. So we set out to try to create a language
that could be shared by a lot of systems, or at least just one
language that each system would have to translate into. Rather
like the way that when you have a room full of Spanish, French,
German, Swedish, and Japanese business men, they don't all bring
their own translator for each of the other languages, they all
speak English.
I have been working on this problem for Shell now for since 1990. Part of what I have done has included developing ISO (International
Standards Organisation) standard data
models for some parts of Chemical Engineering.
During this period I gained Membership of the British Computing
Society, which is the engineering professional body for computing. In 2005 I became responsible for the Architecture and Standards for
Reference Data in Shell's Downstream business. A major task has been the
development of a conceptual data model for Shell's Downstream business.
|
