Case Studies > Chevron Employs APC Best Practices to Get Controllers Online Faster After Unit Turnarounds

Chevron Employs APC Best Practices to Get Controllers Online Faster After Unit Turnarounds

Company Size

1,000+

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

aspenONE APC

Tech Stack

Automated Step Testing
Adaptive Modeling

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Cost Savings
Productivity Improvements

Applicable Industries

Oil & Gas

Applicable Functions

Process Manufacturing

Use Cases

Predictive Maintenance

Services

System Integration

About The Customer

Chevron is one of the world’s largest integrated energy companies. Headquartered in San Ramon, California, it conducts business in more than 100 countries, and is engaged in every aspect of the crude oil and natural gas industry. Chevron’s APC engineers are tasked with improving unit operating margins by maintaining and maximizing APC applications. The company faces challenges in quickly returning a controller to service after a turnaround, which often requires significant controller rework. Chevron addresses these challenges by utilizing innovative sustainability tools, methodologies, and techniques to reduce the effort required to refit controllers and improve performance.

The Challenge

Chevron, a global energy company, faces challenges in maintaining and maximizing APC applications. After a unit turnaround, which involves maintenance, modification, overhaul, inspection, testing, and replacement of process materials and equipment, it is often difficult to return a controller to service without significant rework. The traditional process of managing plant step tests, collecting and cleaning data, and creating and evaluating the model is manual and time-consuming. With many controllers to support and a scarcity of engineering resources, Chevron faces a growing challenge in maintaining APC applications.

The Solution

Chevron uses aspenONE APC applications with sustainability features to maintain greater controller performance. The company utilizes automated step testing, a feature of aspenONE APC, to reduce the time required for monitoring the testing and alleviate the burden on engineers and plant operators who conduct the tests. The software that implements the test is configured as a controller, ensuring that no constraints are violated during the test period. By manipulating multiple variables at once, automated step testing helps Chevron reduce the time required for testing. Other features of aspenONE APC that help maintain controller performance include Detection, Diagnostics, and Correction. These features provide real-time feedback to identify changes in performance, enable rapid isolation of root causes, and implement rules for cleaning data and identifying new models.

Operational Impact

Reduces the time and effort required to build and maintain controller models
Guarantees operations within constraints during testing
Helps maintain safe unit operations before and after revamp
Saves thousands of dollars for each day the controller would have been offline

Quantitative Benefit

The annual benefits from APC on major units in refineries range from $2.5M to $6M per year
Each day a controller is offline can result in the loss of thousands of dollars