Nelson Complexity Index – NCI Definition

Table of Contents

What Is the Nelson Complexity Index?

The Nelson Complexity Index (NCI) is a measure of the sophistication of an oil refinery, where further sophisticated refineries are able to offer lighter, further carefully refined and valuable products from a barrel of oil.

Refineries which could be higher on the Nelson Complexity Index are valued higher relative to their buddies because of their ability to handle lower top quality crude oil or produce further value-added products. As a result of their better complexity, high NCI refineries are further pricey to build and carry out.

Key Takeaways

  • The Nelson Complexity Index (NCI) takes account of what sorts of petroleum products an oil refinery can produce.
  • Measured on a scale from 1 to 20, the higher the value on the NCI, the additional refined and complex products the refinery can produce.
  • Higher-valued refineries on the NCI tend to be further pricey to build and carry out, however as well as produce further a success outputs.

Nelson Complexity Index Outlined

The Nelson Complexity Index was once advanced in 1960 by the use of Wilbur Nelson. Since the details of the best way a refinery operates are difficult to understand without specialized industry knowledge, the Nelson Complexity Index provides an easy metric for quantifying and score the complexity and sophistication of quite a lot of refineries.

Consistent with the Oil and Gas Mag, Nelson if truth be told advanced the complexity index to quantify the relative price of parts that make up a refinery. This is a herbal price index that provides a relative measure of the improvement costs of a particular refinery consistent with its crude and upgrading capacity. The NCI compares the costs of quite a lot of upgrading gadgets to the cost of a herbal crude distillation unit. Computation of the index is an attempt to quantify the relative price of a refinery consistent with the added price of quite a lot of upgrading gadgets and the relative upgrading capacity.

The NCI is measured on a scale from 1 to 20, where low numbers represent refineries which could be simple in nature and bring low-quality gas, harking back to jet gas and heating oil, and high numbers represent further sophisticated and costly refineries that produce high quality delicate fuels, harking back to gas and kerosene.

Which Refineries Will Thrive?

Bain & Company, a keep watch over consulting corporate, has advanced a proprietary kind that shows which oil refineries all over the world are much more likely to prosper and which can be much more likely to fail consistent with their refining capacity and Nelson Complexity Index score. The interactive graphic shows by the use of geographic space where the ones refineries are located. In step with the Nelson Index, on reasonable, U.S. refineries are necessarily probably the most sophisticated on the earth. However, there could also be increasingly extraordinarily sophisticated refineries located in several global places.

Refining plays a vital serve as in maintaining the country’s gas supplies. In Europe, for instance, many refineries have closed because of they are too expensive to make stronger and aren’t ready to offer the usual gas trendy customers name for. Inside the OPEC global places, on the other hand, the most important collection of new investments are set to occur between 2016 and 2021, with nearly 8 million barrels consistent with day of conceivable new refining tasks.


Provide: OPEC.

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