Call it what you wish – 6 Oil, Fuel Oil, RSFO, HSFO, LSFO, or even Burner Oil. The one thing that’s certain is that if your refinery produces this product, you likely have wide room for improving how you optimize fuel oil blend operations.
Desipite all the talk these days about investment requirements needed to meet IMO Regulatory changes, let's ensure that we're minimizing the inefficiencies in our current business.
Many refiners make the mistake of ignoring fuel oil optimization since the specs are not complicated. Refiners would rather focus on gasoline or diesel blend optimization. But let me tell you, there’s likely more money to be made by focusing energy on fuel oil blending than any other product.

When it comes to optimizing refinery bunker blending, there is one spec to focus on - viscosity. There are other specs such as flash, API, sulfur and metals, but the big opportunity for refiners is viscosity. As a rule of thumb, my advice generally is to maximize the gasoil/resid cutpoint and then use distillate to cut the remaining resid.

Maximizing gasoil recovery from resid makes a lot of sense since refiners can crack gasoils into gasoline and distillates. Gasoil is also a very poor cutting agent, so higher fuel oil production results from leaving gasoil in resid. This cutpoint giveaway can be worth $0.5 Million per year for 1 KBD fuel oil production or $5 Million per year for 10 KBD fuel oil production.

Most refiners understand the value in maximizing the gasoil/resid cutpoint. However, a subtle variable not often accounted for is the quality of fuel oil cutter. Like any other blend parameter, bunker oil cutter optimization requires deep technical scrutiny to capture maximum benefits. However, it’s a fact that many refiners meet fuel oil specs with minimum effort.
Let’s take a quick look at some fuel oil blends and get a feel for how much volume is required for different cutter streams.