With site preparation well underway for its U.S. Gulf Coast (USGC) Petrochemicals Project, Chevron Phillips Chemical has named Yokogawa Electric as its main automation contractor (MAC). First announced in March 2011, the project received board approval early last month. It will include a 1.5 million metric tons/year (3.3 billion lbs/year) ethane cracker and two new polyethylene facilities, each with an annual capacity of 500,000 metric tons (1.1 billion lbs).
The ethane cracker will be built at Chevron Phillips Chemical’s Cedar Bayou plant in Baytown, Texas, and two polyethylene units will be built at a site in Old Ocean, Texas, near the manufacturer’s Sweeny plant. The state-of-the-art, world-scale polyethylene units will be able to produce a wide variety of high-density and linear low-density polyethylene products, including bimodal and metallocene-based polyethylene polymers. The flexibility of the units will allow for growth of current blow molding, injection molding and film grades.
The USGC Petrochemicals Project, expected to begin construction early next year, will create about 400 long-term direct jobs and 10,000 engineering and construction jobs.
“We are proud to be part of one of the first grass roots ethylene and polyethylene plants to be built in the U.S. in a very long time,” said Chet Mroz, president and CEO of Yokogawa Corp. of America.
As the project MAC, Yokogawa will supply the control systems, safety systems, remote instrument enclosures, and the analyzer shelters and analytical systems. The control system platform will be based on Yokogawa’s Centum VP integrated production control system. Though classified as a distributed control system (DCS), the Centum VP goes beyond a traditional DCS by offering a more intuitive HMI and a large-capacity field control station to process data faster while maintaining high reliability. The dual-redundant configuration of processor cards, each paired with two CPUs (pair and spare configuration), ensures uninterrupted operations and high availability.
