To meet the growing demand for cleaner environment from the society, most leading oil companies have committed to preserve environment via reduction of greenhouse gases, water and soil pollution as well as the use of natural resources. In most of the oil facilities, they required massive cooling systems to cool down process streams in order to meet the process requirements. The most common cooling system in oil facilities is evaporative cooling water system (ECWS) as such system has high efficiency. Cooling water is commonly used in offices and residential areas. However, the cooling water system is one of the utility systems that generates high environmental impacts due to high consumption of power, water and chemicals. Therefore, it is important to optimize the system in the early design stage of the project to operate in the most effective and efficient condition. In reality, many efforts may be missed out due to loose project definition, inexperience design engineer, hectic project schedule, or resource constraint. Therefore, in order to overcome the previous limitations, this paper presents a comprehensive heuristic improvement framework for cooling water systems in oil operating facilities.

This paper presents a novel methodology that track and measures the overall energy performance in oil and gas companies based on the leading energy performance indicator (EnPI). Although such tool does not directly measure an actual and reflect an as-is operational data of the companies' energy performance, it tracks the achievements in the key work processes or the implementation status of an Energy Management Systems (EnMS). As introduced by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 2011, EnMS consists of interacting elements from proven deployment and implementation steps based on the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) continual improvement framework. The lacks of industrial standards and literature have resulted in the sparse application of leading EnPI. The proposed leading EnPI tool is based on the defined activities that affect the deployment and implementation of EnMS. Such tool is required for continuous improvement and promotion of strong partnership among all stakeholders. To illustrate the proposed methodology, the progress of EnMS implementation, identification of energy-saving initiatives, and review of potential energy savings of the major oil and gas companies are performed.