White Paper

4-Step Roadmap toTop Quartile Performance:Leveraging IIoT to Achieve PetrochemicalOperational Performance

White Paper4-Step Roadmap to Top Quartile Performance

4-Step Roadmap to Top Quartile Performance Leveraging IIoT Innovations to Achieve Operational Efficiency in Petrochemical Plants

Executive summaryApproximately one trillion dollars in company value is lost every year due to suboptimal operating performance. If a plant moves from average to top quartile performance, it can recover some of this lost value, specifically in the four categories of operation depicted in Figure 1-1: Health, Safety, Security and Environment (HSSE); Reliability; Energy; and Process.

Figure 1-1. Petrochemical Plant Operational Categories

Moving into the top quartile produces the following results in each of the four categories:

HSSE: 3X fewer recordable process incidents

Reliability: 4% higher availability and half the maintenance costs

Energy: 30% lower emissions and 30% less energy use

Process: 20% lower operating costs and 10% higher utilization rate

These results are significant not only for the industry as a whole, but also for your plant which can experience a 15% improvement in operating margins. This white paper will show you how to achieve these results in an optimal manner by executing these four steps:

1. Identify areas for improvement

2. Acquire data

3. Analyze data

4. Take corrective action

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While the steps are easy to understand, execution can be challenging. Fortunately, new technologies and techniques, many related to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), are simplifying execution while reducing required investment.

Before we explain how to execute the four steps, let’s look at some of the main challenges facing petrochemical plants.

Petrochemical plant challengesSome of the challenges in petrochemical plants include compliance, aging equipment, working with different feedstocks and retiring subject matter experts.

Compliance challenges include emissions, chemical safety, hazardous waste and pollution, including statutes and regulations such as the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, and Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards. Hazmat (hazardous materials) teams are trained to deal with chemical leaks or spills. Process Hazard Analysis is used to assess potential hazards in chemical plants. Regulations go so far as to cover safety showers and leaks from pressure relief devices (PRDs).

Compliance with all these regulations requires plants to install more sensors to monitor operations, record data and file dozens, if not hundreds, of reports to satisfy state and local auditors and inspectors.

Regulations aim to improve safety and minimize environmental impact. However, without investments in new sensor technologies and automation, regulations can suppress efficiency and a plant’s ability to meet performance metrics.

Aging equipment makes it more difficult for petrochemical plants to comply with regulations or improve operations. Older petrochemical plants were built using just enough wired instruments to safely operate the plant. Additional instruments providing further operational benefits were often not added because the cost of adding them was too high. This lack of inputs can cause petrochemical plants to run blind in many critical areas—necessitating expensive, time-consuming and resource-intensive manual checks. Now, with innovations in technology, additional measurement points can be added cost-effectively with wireless sensors.

Working with different feedstocks is also a concern. The petrochemical industry has traditionally relied on natural gas- and oil-based raw materials and feedstock, but these are changing. For example, the availability of light tight oils is driving plants to take advantage of the significantly higher margins that can be achieved from processing this feedstock. The production of light tight oils relies on the use of fracking fluids, a cocktail of chemicals used to stimulate oil to flow from the field. Canadian oil sands often have a high total acidic number. Many petrochemical plants were designed to process sweet crude, and the changing nature of the feedstock can cause corrosion and processing problems.

Some plants are making the switch from oil to natural gas to take advantage of lower feedstock prices. This switch requires extensive changes to plant processing equipment, along with the addition of many new points of measurement.

White Paper4-Step Roadmap to Top Quartile Performance

Lastly, senior plant experts are retiring. With the loss of deep institutional knowledge and a comprehensive understanding of when and how processes work, senior plant experts know the right questions to ask and the right concerns to address. Inefficiencies surface when subject matter experts leave the workforce.

Despite these challenges, petrochemical plants are continuously tasked with improving the process, but also performance in the areas of energy, reliability and safety. Improvements in these categories can be especially difficult considering ever-increasing regulations, and the growing complexity of acquiring and analyzing data from all areas of the plant.

Here’s how to execute each of the four steps to deal with these common petrochemical plant challenges, improve operations, and move your plant toward operating in the top quartile.

Step 1: Identify areas for improvementIn a complex operation like a petrochemical plant, it can be difficult to make timely and informed decisions about operations and maintenance priorities. Quite often the necessary and relevant information is not available to pinpoint performance issues. However, with technology advancements and new application techniques, great improvements in operational visibility can now be made.

The first step in identifying investment opportunities in HSSE, reliability, energy use and process improvements is determining the economic value associated with improved operational visibility. For example, what’s it worth to know an asset is about to fail, or is operating inefficiently? What would knowing whether or not you could get another two weeks of operation out of your heat exchanger or furnace be worth? Once economic value is estimated, consider what measurements and variables are needed to make an informed decision.

In the addendum to this white paper, you’ll see the Emerson™ process for assisting with this effort. Alternatively, plant personnel can tailor this process and implement it on their own. In either case, the path toward achieving top quartile performance is getting the right information to the right people at the right time. This is the essence of the IIoT, and is summarized in Steps 2 and 3.

Step 2: Acquire dataThe key to a successful IIoT implementation is designing a strategy where sensors are used to monitor “anything, anywhere,” acquiring data from all parts of the plant. Sensors that are non-invasive and communicate wirelessly can greatly simplify installation with little or no downtime, and be applied without interrupting the process.

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Figure 1-2. Pervasive Sensing™ strategies monitor data from anywhere in the plant, analyze it, and alert operations personnel so they can make informed decisions.

Many existing petrochemical plants can benefit from more measurement points, but traditional instruments must be wired from the sensing point to a control and monitoring system. Adding this wiring to an existing facility is usually a very expensive undertaking and often requires significant downtime. WirelessHART® sensors, on the other hand, have built-in power modules and don’t require additional wiring to the plant’s control and monitoring systems. WirelessHART sensors are instead connected through a plant-wide wireless mesh network to control and monitoring systems via a gateway and a single digital communications cable, usually Ethernet or Modbus®.

Step 3: Analyze dataWhen a plant adds Pervasive Sensing techniques, the IIoT/Plantweb™ digital ecosystem generates a large amount of Big Data, and it may be difficult for plant operators and engineers to decide what’s relevant and actionable (Figure 1-3).

Figure 1-3. A modern Plantweb Digital Ecosystem installation will have hundreds of WirelessHART sensors in its Pervasive Sensing system. Data from these sensors can be quickly analyzed using Plantweb software applications.

Heavyweight and expensive enterprise level software management systems often require six-figure investments, extensive training, and months to deploy and see

White Paper4-Step Roadmap to Top Quartile Performance

results. Such systems usually require expensive outside consultants for startup, and significant IT resources in terms of server hardware, dedicated computers, etc.

To aid in the analysis of this Big Data at a more reasonable cost, see the addendum for information on three Emerson analytical solutions: Plantweb Insight™, Plantweb Advisor and Connected Services.

Step 4: Take corrective actionThe fourth and final step is for the plant to take the proper corrective action, which varies from one situation to the next. The following examples show how plants work through each of the first three steps and then take corrective action.

Heat exchangersWireless data from heat exchangers (Figure 1-4) can be analyzed to identify abnormal situations, such as early detection of accelerated fouling in a transfer line exchanger that rapidly cools cracked ethylene. Analysis also determines the optimum time to clean, based on heat transfer degradation and economic calculations. For safety, analysis can determine when heat exchanger bundles are near temperature design limits.

Figure 1-4. Heat exchangers use WirelessHART temperature measurement and analytics to know when equipment is healthy, has reached a warning stage, or has escalated to a critical condition.

In one petrochemical plant with 30 heat exchangers, Pervasive Sensing techniques increased throughput 50% by optimizing heat exchanger cleaning, leading to energy savings of $680,940 annually.

Cooling towersMany cooling towers in petrochemical plants are under-instrumented, or the existing instrumentation is inadequate or corroded. Installing Pervasive Sensing technologies let plants identify imminent failure in bearings or lubrication systems, minimize chemical and water costs by being alerted to improper pH or biological growth, and optimize fan operation by reversing fan direction in periods of cold weather and sequencing the fans for improved power consumption. Plants can control water quality

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with notifications about cycles of concentration and recommendations from the software for blowdown and makeup flows.

Figure 1-5. Monitoring key variables on a cooling tower lets plants optimize fan operation, identify lubrication or alignment problems in fans and pumps, as well as better control cooling water quality.

Installing a Pervasive Sensing solution on a 350,000 gpm cooling tower decreased maintenance costs with early warnings about problems, cut 45% in energy costs, and reduced water supply and disposal costs by 6%, for a total annual savings of $516,311.

Steam trapsMost plants rely on manual rounds, where maintenance technicians test traps (Figure 1-6) once a year at best to identify failures. These manual audits are often incomplete or inadequate, and many problems can go undetected. Estimates are that 18% of the steam traps in a large petrochemical plant fail every year, each causing about $16,000 in lost steam.

Figure 1-6. Monitoring steam traps eliminates the need for manual rounds.

By installing WirelessHART acoustic transmitters and Pervasive Sensing techniques, plants can quickly identify steam traps that fail open or closed, are leaking, or working improperly and need maintenance. The annual savings from monitoring 112 steam traps in an ethylene plant amounted to $342,578.

White Paper4-Step Roadmap to Top Quartile Performance

Pressure relief devicesEPA requires the monitoring of pressure relief devices (PRDs) such as relief valves and rupture discs. Some plants try to identify leaks or problems by observing data from flow or pressure transmitters, but the results are often misleading, requiring maintenance personnel to make manual checks to try to track down a leaking PRD.

Figure 1-7. Relief Valve and Rupture Disc Monitoring Using Wireless Acoustic Transmitter and Wireless Pressure Gauge

Installing WirelessHART acoustic transmitters downstream of relief valves lets maintenance personnel identify leaking or sticking PRDs, take action to repair the valve, and avoid EPA fines due to fugitive emissions of up to $350,000 per incident. In a petrochemical plant with 200 PRDs, the annual energy savings obtained by identifying and repairing leaking PRDs was $1,487,040.

Pervasive Sensing solutions can also be installed on pumps, air-cooled heat exchangers, safety showers, eye wash stations and other equipment.

Example scenarioConsider an ethylene plant producing approximately 600,000 tons per annum, with the following assets to instrument, monitor and analyze:

30 essential heat exchangers

1 cooling tower with 2 pumps and 11 fans

112 steam traps

200 pressure relief valves

30 pumps

30 air cooled heat exchangers

Mobile workforce/plant-wide wireless network

90 safety showers and eyewash stations

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Considering the above eight applications, a one-time investment of approximately $3.37M in WirelessHART sensors, a wireless infrastructure, and data analytics software will result in $4.9M to $6.6M in operating benefits each year. This investment produces a payback in approximately 6-8 months, with an ROI between 45% and 96% in just one year (Table 1-1).

Table 1-1. Potential savings for a 600,000 tons per annum ethylene facility is up to $6.6 million per year on a $3.37 million investment.

To gain even more benefits, additional predictive monitoring applications can be implemented such as level, valve health, motor health, pipe corrosion and others—often with a similar or even better ROI, particularly once the wireless infrastructure is in place.

By acting upon alerts from data analytics tools, which receive inputs from non-invasive WirelessHART sensors, operators can prevent unexpected equipment failures, while optimizing resources such as spare parts inventory and worker expertise. This continuous monitoring and predictive maintenance approach greatly improves upon the limitations of time-based maintenance where equipment is serviced whether it needs it or not, and where problems can arise between scheduled inspections.

ConclusionAfter areas for improvement are identified, Pervasive Sensing solutions collect process and asset health data, which can be automatically analyzed in Plantweb software or by Connected Services. Results from analysis can alert operators of abnormal operation or imminent failure, allowing plant personnel to take corrective action.

The examples shown above are primarily for improvements to equipment operation, but these can also improve safety, prevent releases that could result in fines and penalties, and extend the life of expensive process equipment.

In addition, Big Data from wired instruments, wireless sensors and other sources can be combined and analyzed to perform unit and plant optimization, schedule product campaigns, and provide solutions to other plant or even company-wide operating issues.

ApplicationSavings

($M)Implementation cost

($M)ROI payback

(months)

Heat exchanger monitoring 0.5 - 0.7 0.23 4

Cooling tower monitoring 0.4 - 0.5 0.15 4

Steam trap monitoring 0.3 - 0.4 0.18 6

Relief valve monitoring 2.8 - 3.7 1.59 6

Pump monitoring 0.2 - 0.3 0.21 8

Air cooled heat exchanger monitoring 0.3 - 0.4 0.26 9

Mobile workforce 0.4 - 0.6 0.40 9

Safety shower and eye wash monitoring Per incident 0.35 Safety

Total 4.9 - 6.6 3.37 Average: 6.5

White Paper4-Step Roadmap to Top Quartile Performance

Because many Pervasive Sensing solutions are based on non-invasive WirelessHART technology, wireless sensors can be installed throughout a petrochemical plant to monitor key equipment, and the data they provide is compatible with any petrochemical plant automation system or historian.

The return on your investment in these Pervasive Sensing solutions is typically only a matter of months, and implementation is relatively quick and simple. Each plant in your fleet can experience a 15% improvement in operating margins, a significant improvement typically amounting to seven figures annually.

If you’d like to contact an Emerson representative, please visit Emerson.com/Rosemount/Petrochemical and request a call or email.

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AddendumEmerson can work with plants to identify areas for improvement (Step 1) in the following operations categories:

Health, Safety, Security, Environment (HSSE) HSSE application solutions reduce costs by enabling your petrochemical plant to predict and prevent abnormal conditions, instead of simply reacting to them. By monitoring equipment, you can reduce safety and security risks, and be alerted to any issues so you can respond quickly. Besides being able to protect your personnel and the environment, your team can better maintain the mechanical integrity of equipment, improve operational procedures for dealing with potential problems, and streamline regulatory compliance.

ReliabilityReliability application solutions help your team avoid unplanned slowdowns, and shutdowns caused by previously unmonitored or manually-monitored equipment. These solutions detect conditions that can lead to equipment failure, and replace manual, periodic readings with online insight into equipment health, minimizing trips to the field. Besides realizing increased process availability and improved asset reliability, you will be able to decrease maintenance costs while mitigating safety and environmental risks.

EnergyEnergy application solutions help your team identify inefficiencies and optimize facility performance. For example, it’s estimated that half the energy consumed by process manufacturers is used for producing and managing steam. By wirelessly monitoring steam traps, you can significantly reduce energy consumption and improve overall operational efficiency.

ProcessProcess application solutions increase plant efficiency by reducing material costs and increasing plant throughput. A common cause of poor efficiency is process variability—often small, undetected shifts in process variables that, when added up, take a toll on overall profitability. By implementing WirelessHART network solutions, your team can extend mobility applications and provide benefits in start-up efficiencies while reducing operator rounds. You can also get data from process points previously too expensive or too hard to reach with traditional wired instruments. Data from these new wireless sensors can help automate many manual and inefficient process safety and control functions.

Emerson works with plant personnel to implement the five-step process shown in Figure 1-8 to identify priorities.

White Paper4-Step Roadmap to Top Quartile Performance

Figure 1-8. Emerson works with petrochemical plant personnel to identify the best areas for investment.

During the preliminary assessment, Emerson experts and key plant personnel walk the site, examining equipment and processes; noting available instrumentation, wiring and I/O infrastructure; and evaluating areas for improvement.

Next, Emerson and plant experts identify areas where improvements will result in a quick ROI. Emerson will prepare an economic study with investment and ROI detailed for each project, and present to the plant for approval.

Emerson assistance with activities 2, 3, and 4Once an assessment is complete and all agree on the areas of improvement, Emerson and/or plant personnel will install the monitoring systems and analytical software, and Emerson will train key personnel. After the systems have been operational for a period of time, Emerson will revisit the plant and verify everything is operating according to plan.

Emerson Automation Solutions has introduced the Plantweb digital ecosystem (Figure 1-9), consisting of WirelessHART sensors to acquire the necessary data, a wireless infrastructure to bring the data to the plant’s control and monitoring systems, and Plantweb analytics or Connected Services to analyze the data and make recom-mendations for corrective action.

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Figure 1-9. Petrochemical plant implementing a Plantweb digital ecosystem with WirelessHART measurement points.

Either of the following three Emerson products can be used to perform Step 3, Analyze Data.

Plantweb InsightPlantweb Insight software acquires continuous, dependable, real-time, rich data from wired and wireless devices, and uses pre-built analytics to transform raw sensor data into actionable information, allowing plant personnel to be more efficient.

Plantweb Insight is accessible from any web browser running on a desktop computer, laptop, tablet or mobile device (Figure 1-10).

Figure 1-10. Plantweb Insight can be accessed from PCs, tablets, and smartphones.

Because each of these solutions is purpose-built for a specific asset, they are quick, easy and inexpensive to implement. Plantweb Insight applications cost less than $10,000 for the first application, and about $2,000 to $5,000 for each additional application. And with a wireless infrastructure in place, it’s easy to add more Plantweb Insight applications.

White Paper4-Step Roadmap to Top Quartile Performance

For example, adding Plantweb Insight for steam trap monitoring is simple and inexpensive. When wireless acoustic transmitters are installed on steam traps, they automatically join the plant’s WirelessHART mesh network, are recognized by the wireless Gateway, and begin transmitting data. After configuration, Steam Trap Insight automatically gathers and analyzes the data, then reports abnormal situations that could be affecting the process and bottom line results.

With Plantweb Insight, no development or analysis is required from plant engineers. Instead, the pre-built analytics know what data is needed and how to turn raw pressure, temperature, level, flow, vibration, acoustic, discrete and other data into easy-to-understand, actionable insights.

Plantweb AdvisorEmerson’s Plantweb Advisor Suite is a scalable set of software products that includes Health Advisor, Performance Advisor and Energy Advisor. All of these products leverage the industry-standard OSIsoft Pi System and its highly scalable open data infrastructure to capture and shape data generated by equipment. The Plantweb Advisor Suite takes data from the entire plant via the existing Pi System—both existing wired transmitters and new wireless sensors.

Using the Plantweb Advisor Suite, a plant’s essential assets are continuously monitored for potential problems with Health Advisor, operating efficiency of a plant’s equipment is tracked through Performance Advisor, and Energy Advisor maps and manages a plant’s energy consumption in real time.

Health Advisor derives asset health from a patented algorithm developed by Emerson and defined as a range of zero (worst) to 100 percent (perfectly healthy). This is calculated as a function of machinery issues such as vibration or mechanical defects, and process issues such as pump cavitation or heat exchanger fouling. Overall asset health is weighted based on the criticality of the fault detected, and the solution monitors differences from a known good state. Given that process severity can, at times, outweigh mechanical severity, this approach ensures the most severe faults drive the determination of asset health.

Performance Advisor is a real-time application that calculates equipment performance, enabling plant operators to run processes more efficiently, track operating performance against targets, schedule maintenance activities, and determine the root cause of production asset inefficiencies. These inefficiencies result from the gradual deterioration of equipment throughout time and other issues. When this happens, plants can experience increased energy usage and reduced throughput. To combat this and ensure profitability, accurate identification of the deviation from equipment design combined with early detection is vital.

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Figure 1-11. Performance Advisor and Health Advisor software analyze equipment operations.

Energy Advisor is a real-time energy management information system that automates the process of mapping and managing energy consumption as it is being consumed. Real-time alerts, dashboards and emails signal when energy consumption is higher than expected so that actions may be taken to reduce energy costs.

The application is built to receive energy measurement data and present it in a way that enables decisions to be made quickly, without wasting time on data manipulation and complex calculations. The state of site energy consumption can be easily understood, and a simple roadmap highlighting concerns can be easily accessed.

Connected ServicesEven with Plantweb Advisor or Plantweb Insight, some aspects of data analysis may still require subject matter experts in the plant to interpret the results properly. In other instances, plants may prefer to outsource all or part of data analysis.

Many petrochemical plants are losing senior experts to retirement, and younger engineers may not have the time or necessary experience. To overcome this, Plantweb can be instructed to deliver data to subject matter experts at Emerson.

At Emerson’s Connected Services (Figure 1-12), Emerson experts located offsite can monitor your assets, interpret the results, and provide an actionable summary so you can align maintenance and operation activities with your business strategy. This lets you make decisions informed by existing conditions and experience to improve the output of your existing equipment, systems and applications.

White Paper4-Step Roadmap to Top Quartile Performance

Figure 1-12. Emerson’s Connected Services provides offsite subject experts who can analyze data from a plant and make recommendations.

Another benefit is that this service can be delivered as a subscription model with monthly payments, avoiding upfront capital investments.

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Standard Terms and Conditions of Sale can be found on the Terms and Conditions of Sale page.The Emerson logo is a trademark and service mark of Emerson Electric Co.Pervasive Sensing, Plantweb, Plantweb Insight, Rosemount, and Rosemount logotype are trademarks of Emerson.Modbus is a registered trademark of Gould Inc.WirelessHART is a registered trademark of the FieldComm Group.All other marks are the property of their respective owners.© 2017 Emerson. All rights reserved.