As a process consultant, one regular request that crops up is to debottleneck a process. That is, identifying what stage limits the capabilities of a plant. It could be vessel, pumps, compressors… actually it usually turns out to be the compressors, as they are expensive pieces of hardware, and sized to just barely meet the design intent (provocative statement, rotating machinery engineers!).
Now, what happens that as you remove one bottleneck, another one crops out, which you will tackle ad infinitum until your rate of return drops below your tolerance limit.
To put this in perspective, I’ve attached a video of a new road which was meant to debottleneck traffic by replacing a curvy toll bypass with a straight length. Problem is, it dead ends from a 4-lane road to a 2-lane road which feeds into another 2-lane road, which is the real bottleneck.
Photos of the link road follow, in a direction opposite to the video just to confuse things:
Wata - Malaysian Oil and Gas Engineer 
Jabba held the last convention for road planners about 10 yrs ago, basically, told them to the following;
build every single road as a single lane alleyway,
build a good 4 lane expressway,
and they’ve got debottlenecking projects for the rest of their lifetime
If everyone designed to the proper capacity of plant, where would the “debottlenecking” specialist be.
To Jabba: Remind Wata to put in 10% per year in the kitty for every asset / battle platform / death star your slaves have designed, to remove the bottlenecks.
you can pay me for info.
what i normally do generate a proper design, role the dice and reduce it by the percentage shown on the dice.
will sell the original correct design of the battle platform/death star for the money in the kitty
i think the real reason behind bottlenecks would be the veeeery subjective definition of “capacity” during the design stage.
for offshore platforms, how would the 80’s reservoir engineer knows that you could suck out additional capacity from that crooked fault crack in the reservoir by using the horizontal drilling technology in the 90’s?
for refineries, who would have thought crude price could multiply almost ten times between 1997 to 2008 – hence adding additional capacity could make the refinery extremely profitable?
for the general poor condition of traffic in kl, who would have thought that in the 90’s and beyond, one household would have 2 cars as a minimum (including people who lives in low cost residential area) and the public transportation sucked big time since they stopped the bas mini services?
by the way wata, your imperial cruiser apparently looks very nice with its emblem clearly shown on the pics and vids…
i guess wata is sitting in the passenger seat. his wife is highly unlikely candidate in helping him take movies for the blog.
All: the difficulty is trying to gauge how much debottlenecking is worth. As operations, they either want: i) a big project, to move cost into capex, or ii) debottleneck by procedures, so there is no big opex expenditure. Maybe we should have a target, say USD250k/kbd increase?