The production processes at Natural Fuels Australia Ltd’s (NFAL) new bio-diesel plant in Darwin will be monitored and managed by a Yokogawa Centum CS3000 R3 Distributed Control System (DCS).
Located at the East Arm Port, adjacent to the new Darwin Industry Fuel Terminal, the Darwin plant is NFAL’s first bio-diesel production facility. Nameplate capacity is 120,000 tonnes per year (tpy) of bio-diesel fuel and 12,000 tpy of medical-grade pharmaglycerine, produced from palm oil imported from Malaysia.
Constructed for NFAL by Lurgi Pacific, the facility incorporates bio-diesel manufacturing technology supplied, under a licence agreement, by Lurgi AG.
The only plant in Australia to use vegetable oils as feedstock and the largest single facility of its type to date, the plant makes use of a CENTUM CS300R3 DCS, Yokogawa’a flagship integrated production control system, to monitor all production and process management data generated by a series of specialist field instruments installed throughout the plant.
Introduced in 1999 and regularly updated to retain its market-leading status, the Centum system is designed to handle everything from small-scale facilities to the very largest of plants. It features a range of sophisticated functions and components to meet all production site requirements and, using the latest technologies, allows for full interconnectivity of each production level.