What if your next refinery shutdown didn’t cost as much—or last as long?
Downtime in oil refineries can result in losses reaching hundreds of thousands of dollars per day, making rapid recovery not just a priority—but a necessity. Achieving a swift return to full operations demands seamless coordination across all departments, yet there’s one critical and often underestimated factor that continues to hinder recovery efforts:
Supply chain disruptions.
Interruptions in the availability of process filtration supplies can derail production schedules, compromise safety standards, and lead to costly operational setbacks across oil and gas applications. In environments like these, proactive filter maintenance and strategic inventory planning aren't optional—they are essential.
Partnering with experts like Filter Resources, an MCE company, sets up a smooth execution of planned outages and be prepared for unplanned outages. Start with these tips to turn maintenance downtime into a streamlined operation with measurable ROI.
6 Tips for Smarter Refinery Outage Planning
1. Improve Communication Across Departments
Planners, process engineers, production managers, and general maintenance all play a significant role in the success of planned outages and emergency events. Any information gaps between these departments can derail maintenance and repair activities, parts supply availability, and lost production.
Work with supply partners to document usage of critical spare parts replacements and maintenance schedules. We recommend proactively managing inventory items in real time and gathering usage data to reduce stock shortages and overages. This improves communication efforts and ensures you have the parts you need to get back online.
>> MRO Inventory: A Guide to Efficient Spare Parts Inventory Management
2. Consider Vendor Managed Filtration Inventory
Vendor managed inventory programs improve supply chain responsiveness for refineries looking to schedule planned outages. By having filter inventory managed by a trusted supplier, you’ll have critical items when you need them. You also have the option to have MCE support consignment inventory. With this option, you don’t need to purchase the essential parts and materials until they are needed, freeing up capital, reducing storage costs, and lessening the risk of holding dead stock.
3. Use Vendor Zone Stores
The Zone Store program is designed to ensure quick, local access to essential filtration products, while offering the convenience of on-site stock control with off-site vendor support.
Zone stores help refineries during planned shutdowns with efficient and organized storage of materials, tools, and equipment for quick access during the shutdown process.
They also complement inventory management programs, especially during planned outages, by optimizing inventory levels to minimize the risk of stockouts, a critical component of successful maintenance activities.
Benefits of using MCE’s Zone Store Program:
- Immediate availability: Reduces downtime
- Inventory visibility: Helps with planning & troubleshooting
- VMI-style support: Lightens workload on plant staff
- Streamlined restocking: Simplified ordering process
>> Learn more: Zone Stores and Strategies for Refinery Maintenance and Improved Uptime
4. Refurbish Filters When Possible
Not every filter needs a new replacement. For example, radial fin filters, typically found at air intake or exhaust points, are good candidates for refurbishing. They are made up of a durable metal inner core wrapped with a synthetic cover made of polyester, polypropylene, or glass. Over time, they can accumulate materials like dust, pellets, and even debris from the environment, eventually clogging them and reducing efficiency.
Refurbishing radial fin filter units and installing a new filter cover can drastically reduce costs compared to purchasing an entirely new unit.
>> 10 Best Practices for Industrial Filtration Solutions in Oil & Gas Industry
5. Deploy Rental Filter Vessels
Filter vessels provide mechanical support (a housing) for the filtration elements, such as filter cartridges, filter bags and strainer baskets. MCE’s rental vessels are a temporary physical filtration housing unit, often mounted on a skid for portability and designed to hold replaceable filter elements.
Using rental vessels helps refineries pre-clean, filter, or test filtration solutions for planned maintenance, emergency events, or a trial need.
Physical filter vessels are often used during system upsets, planned outages, system cleanups (e.g., tank or barge cleaning), or pilot testing of filtration solutions. These standalone vessels create a contained loop to continuously circulate and clean the process stream to stabilize conditions or test filtration changes. Rather than purchasing them, you can rent these vessels from a trusted supplier like MCE-Filter Resources. Once the job is complete, you simply clean/decontaminate the rental units and return them to Filter Resources with no capital expenditures.
>> Learn more about MCE’s Rental Filter Vessels
6. Lean on Filtration Experts for Advice
In the filtration industry, expertise isn't learned in a classroom — it's earned through years of hands-on experience and shared insight.
“There’s no university in the world that teaches Filtration 101.”
- Sidney Mondin, General Manager at MCE Filter Resources.
Having a partner with a deep understanding of your business is vital, especially when navigating complex applications or retrofitting filters into competitor housings. With a deep bench of knowledge and decades of industry connections, MCE leverages this expertise to support customers with real-world solutions, often around the clock.
>> Fill your technical skills gap with MCE’s Flow Control Experts
Partner with Filtration Experts to Streamline Every Shutdown
Proactive planning, efficient inventory management, and partnering with experienced filtration experts like MCE can significantly reduce the cost and disruption of refinery downtime. By thinking ahead—and taking advantage of MCE’s solutions such as refurbishment programs, rental vessels, and Zone Stores—refineries can maximize uptime while staying within budget.
Contact us to see how we can help plan an efficient shutdown:
