Emerson Exchange 365

Adopting a project management strategy that employs technologies such as electronic marshalling and virtualization, Shell can potentially save more than 32 percent in capital expenditures for the design of a plant automation system in a world-scale petrochemicals facility being built on the nation’s east coast.

The strategy, which reduces complexity and risk while providing the schedule flexibility needed to accommodate design changes, was developed by Emerson, the main automation contractor for this greenfield project. It incorporates key elements and processes from Emerson’s Project Certainty – a transformational approach to enabling top-quartile performance in capital projects.

Details of the strategy were presented this week at the 2016 Emerson Exchange in Austin, Texas by Jaime Ortiz, project manager from Shell Global Solutions Inc., and Emerson Program Manager Anup Seshadri. The project is now in detail design.

A large percentage of the savings results from the use of CHARacterization Modules (CHARMs), a technology that enables electronic marshalling. Electronic marshalling with CHARMs can eliminate up to 75 percent of the work traditionally required to bring a measurement from the field to control room, Seshadri said. This is possible because CHARMs technology recognizes varying signal types from thousands of different field devices, allowing a plant’s devices to be added, moved, and changed depending upon the final automation design architecture. Using CHARMs, Shell would reduce equipment and cabinets as well as wiring and installation costs while dramatically simplifying the plant’s final control system design.

Another key aspect of the automation strategy, Seshadri said, is the reduction of its hardware, footprint and power consumption through the virtualization of its control room computers. Typically, these computers occupy significant space but through virtualization they can reside and run on a smaller group of high-powered vortex servers, allowing for easier software upgrades and patch management – and requiring less space. For this project, that is translating into a reduction in control room cabinets from 100 to 40, he said.

The innovative strategy adopted by Shell and Emerson also extends to the testing phase of this project, Ortiz said, which will utilize an unusual – if not unprecedented – virtual CSU effort enabled by a high-fidelity model of the plant completely integrated with the DeltaV system. Not only does this approach reduce costs, he said, but it ensures a defect-free configuration and provides schedule flexibility at site by reducing the commissioning and startup time at site to less than six months – a phase that typically requires more than a year.