Crude oil distillation is a highly energy-intensive process and represents one of the most important areas for energy integration in a refinery. Current practice recovers "useful energy" by pump-around refluxes in type A columns for the preheating of crude oil in heat exchanger trains; however, energy-recovery "targets" are not well-defined or known a priori. This work presents a simple methodology for developing invariant" column grand composite curves (CGCCs) for type U and type A columns using the well-established principles of "pinch analysis" and the refining-industry accepted Packie＇s method for designing/rating crude columns. The CGCCs for type U and type A columns set the "thermodynamic" and "practical" heat-recovery targets, respectively. Since the CGCCs developed in this work are invariant with respect to pump-around reflux and depend only on the feed and product rates and specifications at given conditions of temperature and pressure, they set "reflux-energy-recovery" targets for either designing a "new" crude column or retrofitting an existing column. The application of this methodology is illustrated by means of a "case study".