Metso’s iESD valve with Neles ValvGuard® intelligent safety valve controller received interesting recognition in Tom Clancy’s newest best seller book “Dead or Alive”. In the book, Petrobras Paulinia (REPLAN) oil refinery is a target for a terrorist attack, but Metso’s intelligent safety valves are hampering their deceitful plans. Here, in an extract from p. 566: “The facility’s hundreds of control valves (officially known as ESDs; or emergency shutdown devices), which regulated the flow of chemicals to the labyrinth of distillation columns, fractionation towers, cracking units, and blending and storage tanks, were virtually invulnerable, having been recently refitted with something called a Neles ValvGuard system, which was, in turn, regulated from the refinery’s control center, which from their earlier reconnaissance trips they knew was below ground and heavily fortified.” The REPLAN refinery has a wide installed base of Metso’s flow control products amounting to 800 industrial valves and around 400 Neles ValvGuards, which have been in use at the refinery for several years. The refinery produces nearly 400,000 bpd of oil. Considering the complexity of the production process, high reliability and safe operation of valves is of utmost importance. Among its other features, Neles ValvGuard enables automatic Partial Stroke Testing and internal pneumatics testing during normal process operation.
