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Ergon wins PlantWeb Excellence Award; nine Best-in-Track winners named

By Jim Montague

PlantWeb Award Photo 
PlantWeb Award Photo
Baseball coaches talk about touching all the bases. Performers talk about triple-threats who can sing, act and dance. When the process engineers and other technical professionals at the Emerson Global Users Exchange talk about end users that can do literally everything well, they inevitably focus on each year's winner of the PlantWeb Excellence Award and the event's Best-in-Track presenters.

Organizers reviewed more than 850 submissions, and presented some 450 sessions in this year's five new topical tracks for 2014. Of these, 21 sessions were nominated for Best-in-Track awards, and just nine won. For the PlantWeb Excellence Award, more than 30 nominees were evaluated and interviewed, and just three finalists were chosen.

The winner of the 2014 PlantWeb Excellence Award was Ergon Refining Inc., a sophisticated crude oil processor, transporter and marketer of refined products. Headquartered in Jackson, Miss., Ergon operates two refineries in Vickburg, Miss., and in Newell, W.V. Its 2,300 employees also conduct oil and gas explorations, and run both terminal and asphalt operations.

The award was presented by Steve Sonnenberg, president of Emerson Process Management, at a lunch on the fourth day of Emerson Global Users Exchange this week in Orlando, FL. "The judges of these awards look for improvements in capital and operating expenditures and risk. They look for operational gains, such as quality, availability and throughput, and then seek documentation of these results, benefits, and savings," said Sonnenberg. "They're looking for users who really squeeze all the juice out of PlantWeb."

Ergon's winning presentation, "Make the Most of Your Plant Assets Using PlantWeb," was presented by Steve Giddens, senior systems analyst, and Steven Elwart, Ergon's systems engineering director. Their Vicksburg facility implemented many aspects of Emerson's PlantWeb technology, including:

  • DeltaV with traditional HART I/O, FOUNDATION fieldbus and CHARMs electronic marshalling technology
  • Mobile Worker units with six wireless access points
  • AMS Suite software with ValveLink, Smart Meter Verification, and other SNAP-ON applications
  • Wireless I/O cards, THUMs, vibration and acoustic components
  • Rosemount Tank Radar equipment
  • Fisher valves with FieldVue positioners
  • Online vibration monitoring with CSI 9420

Giddens and Elwart reported these solutions produced numerous capital and operational improvements for Ergon. Capital expense (CapEx) benefits included:

  • Significantly reduced sensor installation costs using wireless
  • Loop checks that are four times faster, but require only one-third as many staffers
  • Big savings in cabinets, spare parts, and engineering with CHARMs
  • FOUNDATION fieldbus implementations that paid for themselves in wiring costs and diagnostics

At the same time, operational benefits at Ergon included

  • Increased capacity and avoided capital investments through wireless tank monitoring
  • Consistent setup through AMS Suite software, resulting in reduced commissioning costs
  • Reduced call-outs with AMS Alert Monitor, saving time and money
  • Improved safety, through vibration monitoring in difficult spots
  • Energy savings enabled by wireless steam trap monitoring 

Likewise, the two other finalists for the PlantWeb Excellence Award achieved similar gains.

In the first, Anucha Pudkhunthod, senior APC/DCS engineer at HMC Polymers, and Jonas Berge of Emerson Process Management, presented "Petrochemical Plant Achieves World-Class Performance Using Time-Synchronized Digital Closed Loop Control." HMC's propane dehydrogenation (PDH) plant in Thailand started operation in 2011, and they reported that its DeltaV control system was specially engineered with FOUNDATION fieldbus to meet the process licensor’s exacting demands for dynamic performance of control loops by using time-synchronized control-in-the-field for high performance. They explained how HMC's control architecture and the approach taken to meet and exceed performance requirements cost effectively. They also covered how the same architecture is used for intelligent device management with AMS Suite software, and shared results and experiences.

In the second, Al Schmidt, supervising I&C engineer at URS Corp., Richard Marchetti of URS and Eric Schulz of Applied Control Equipment presented "High Integrity Pressure Protection System (HIPPS) - Integrated SIL3 Solution." The trio described two HIPPS projects that URS and Emerson delivered on multiple midstream gas processing facilities. The HIPPS solution used multiple Emerson technologies to ensure IEC61511 and IEC61508 compliance for SIL3 level safety. A HIPPS solution isolates the plant from the pressure source with a level of availability equal to or greater than a pressure relief valve and associated flare system. HIPPS can eliminates the need for costly upgrades to existing relief/flare systems, or reduce the size of new relief/flare systems.

Meanwhile, innovation solutions by the nine Best-in-Track award winners were also honored at the lunchtime event.

Solve and Support Track

Praful Sonara and Abdulrahman Johar of Saudi Aramco, presented "Improving Control System Reliability by Proper Grounding System and Sound Engineering." They reported that Qurayyah Seawater Plant (QSWP) of Saudi Aramco is the biggest seawater injection plant in the world, and it uses DeltaV DCS for process control and monitoring. One older area at QSWP had very high nuisance equipment trips. To resolve this problem, a new grounding system was constructed for each treatment module, and 29 high-power solenoids at each module were replaced by low-power solenoids. These solenoids were connected directly to the DeltaV DO cards, which reduced equipment trips, and saved about $635,000 per year via production loss avoidance and labor savings.

Bill Nosbisch of Ingram Barge and John Hillencamp of Emerson delivered "Remote Wireless Inventory Management." They reported that Custom Fuels was looking to quickly and accurately reduce its cost-of-sale (COS) cycle, and picked Emerson's wireless technology as the backbone of their system—not only for custody transfer, but also for inventory control of all tanks. By using WirelessHART instruments from Emerson, such as 3308 wireless, guided-wave radar for tank inventory control, Custom Fuels can do real time monitoring of all tanks at their headquarters in Nashville, Tenn. They added that Emerson's solution reduced their COS and drastically improved their billing cycle.

Measure and Analyze Track

Robert Kemp of Suncor Energy and Joseph Clarke of Spartan Controls delivered "Regulatory Meter Verification Reports for Vortex Transmitters." They stated that using the AMS QuickCheck SNAP-ON application and the diagnostics of Rosemount 8800D vortex transmitters allowed Suncor and Spartan Controls to design a meter verification report that confirms operation and meter setup. This enables confident statements to regulatory bodies that these transmitters are operating correctly, and it has also reduced the maintenance time to one third of the original work-order time.

Keith Hoffman of NorthStar Blue Scope Steel, Barry Coultas of ECI and Dan Phillips of Emerson delivered "Roughing Stand Condition Monitoring at NorthStar Blue Scope Steel." This hot strip mill upgraded its production capacity by increasing slab thickness from 90 mm to 103 mm, but this initially had some adverse effects on the reliability of the mechanical drive train components. The roughing stand had also suffered from unexplained failures of rolling element bearings and couplings. As a result, transient torque meters were integrated with Emerson's CSI machinery health monitoring technology. Detection of overload events and bearing faults saved the mill more than $2 million so far in parts and unscheduled downtime.

Operate and Manage Track

Anthony DeJohn of Bristol-Myers Squibb presented "An Integrated Approach to DeltaV Diagnostics." He reported how R&D facilities at Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) are leveraging DeltaV diagnostics, work instructions, a cellular pager system, and an Enterprise PI historian to increase diagnostics visibility and awareness of DeltaV system faults. This integrated approach has provided tools to increase awareness of upset conditions, promote compliance, enhance and expedite troubleshooting abilities and generate metrics.

Rich Baker, Tuan Ho and Laura Sheets, all of Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), delivered "New Operator Overview Dashboards." They illustrated the paradigm shift for operations personnel on changing from panel-board graphical interfaces to the current Delta V System Overview dashboards now used at SRNS's tritium facility. As operator graphic interfaces were changed over the years, a lot of resistance had been encountered. However, the new dashboard design allowed operators to quickly scan the heartbeat of a system to determine if they needed to explore further. System engineers and experienced operators were used in the development of these dashboards to capture pertinent data.

John Rezabek of Ashland presented "Traversing Hyperspace in the N-Cube to Rationalize Alarms." He reported that the real constraints on Ashland's processes are typically moving targets, and multitudes of variables are highly correlated and interdependent. How does one best determine the settings, criticality, and priority of alarms? This presentation examined a novel tool for visualizing the interactions of hundreds of tags mined from years of PI data. When process specialists apply meaningful filters and conditionals, previously unseen relationships are highlighted, and the determination of unique and optimum operating constraints was greatly expedited.

Final Control and Regulate Track

Shawn Boser and Nilesh Desai of Suncor Energy, and Brent Block and Ryan McKimmie of Spartan Controls, delivered "An Ounce of Prevention—Protecting Coker Facilities by Implementing an Interlock System on Severe Service Electric Actuators." In the autumn of 2007, Suncor experienced an incident at their upgrading complex in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. An ejector valve on one of the coke drums was inadvertently opened while the drum was charging with 900°F bitumen resulting in $30 million of lost production. This incident highlighted the need for a coker valve interlock system that could withstand the severe heat and vibration that the actuators are subjected to. Suncor and Spartan collaborated to find a solution, and it has performed reliably and saved Suncor over $3 million dollars per year in lost production avoidance. 

Business Management and Career Development Track 

Mitch Jones of R.E. Mason Co. presented "How to Utilize Visual Storytelling to Advance Your Ideas and Career." Jones reported that a daily flood of data threatens our ability to focus and engage in effective decision making. This is especially pertinent when seeking approval for project funding or initiative buy-in. He showed how attendees can increase their probability of success by differentiating their message through visual storytelling. Cold hard data is the supporting cast, while the visual story is the lead. He also showed how to deliver messages that stick with target audiences, and rise above the digital noise.

  • Feeling grateful to have had dinner with Ergon's  and  at EE365's Dinner with an Expert. Looking like they are putting that reliability problem-solving to use in new and exciting ways. Congrats, gentlemen!