Emerson Exchange 365

Since it opened in the mid-1970s, Ergon, Inc.’s refinery in Vicksburg, Mississippi, has expanded from a single sweet crude processing unit into a versatile facility capable of producing 25,000 barrels a day of naphtha, diesel, and petrochemical feedstock. As a family owned business, Ergon has been able to grow by seeking out new ways to compete with its bigger corporate rivals. This has meant becoming early adopters of recent advances in automation technology, namely Emerson’s PlantWeb digital plant architecture.

At the 2014 Emerson Global Users Exchange, Ergon’s Director of Systems Engineering Steve Elwart, Ph.D., and Senior Systems Analyst Steve Giddens discussed how the PlantWeb architecture has turned into a boon for the Vicksburg refinery—and for Ergon’s bottom line.

“Our primary product is a specialty-grade petrochemical feedstock used by boutique customers who are willing to pay a premium for consistent quality,” Elwart said. “This makes reliable instrumentation extremely important, which is why we started investing in next generation measurement technology early on.”

The plant’s digital evolution has progressed in stages over the years, beginning with one wireless transmitter and developing into a full pervasive field network. As Elwart explained, the flexibility that allowed for this gradual migration was one of the main reasons Ergon decided to go with the PlantWeb architecture in the first place. “There’s a lot of variety in the processes we run onsite—some have more safety and regulatory requirements than others, and some involve multiple brands of wireless products and field devices. The compatibility of Emerson products has been a big plus for us, and has allowed us to expand more strategically.”

To ensure that a consistent vision is implemented throughout the refinery, Ergon has put together a five-member critical site team. The team includes a LBP Team Leader, Emerson Executive Sponsor, an Emerson solution architect whose duty is to know what technology is available and what solutions are best for specific problems, and two implementation leaders who see that projects are carried out effectively.

Ergon has seen much of the benefit from the digital plant architecture in the form of reduced downtime and lower maintenance costs. The predictive maintenance capabilities of Emerson’s AMS Suite: Intelligent Device Manager allow crews to detect potential issues based on real-time performance data, and make repairs as needed before problems become severe. “The number of maintenance calls has increased, but the criticality of each call has gone down dramatically, which has cut cost overall,” Elwart remarked. “Our engineers don’t get those dreaded late-night phone calls anymore.”

But the advantages to the digital architecture don’t stop there. “With Emerson’s Smart Wireless Mobile Worker solution, which brings equipment health data out of the control room and into the field, we can complete 40 control loop checks in one shift instead of 10, freeing up personnel to attend to other things,” Giddens said.

Ergon sees virtualization technology as “the next big evolution” for its control systems, and the company also has plans to employ advanced process control in some of the refinery’s critical units. Meanwhile, the digital plant architecture will remain an integral part of Ergon’s strategy going forward. “PlantWeb has allowed us to implement world-class technology in a relatively small facility while leveraging our assets in ways that we hadn’t been able to before,” Elwart concluded. “We’ve found it to be a solid, stable approach, and we expect to discover new ways to get even more out of it in the future.”