Chevron Phillips enlists Yokogawa to automate new Texas cracker, PE plants

Yokogawa Electric  has been selected as the main automation contractor for Chevron Phillips Chemical's US Gulf Coast (USGC) petrochemicals project, the companies announced on Wednesday.

The project was first announced in March 2011 and will include a 1.5 million tpy (3.3 billion lb/year) ethane cracker and two new polyethylene facilities, each with a capacity of 500,000 tpy (1.1 billion lb/year).

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 existing Sweeny plant of Chevron Phillips. 

The USGC project is expected to commence construction in early 2014 and create approximately 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 US in a very long time,” said Chet Mroz, CEO of Yokogawa Corp. of America. 

As the main automation contractor, 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.  

While CENTUM VP is classified as a distributed control system (DCS), it goes beyond a traditional DCS by offering a more intuitive human machine interface and a large-capacity field control station to process data faster while maintaining high reliability, according to the company.

Yokogawa notes that the dual-redundant configuration of processor cards combined with pairing each processor card with two CPUs (pair and spare configuration) ensures uninterrupted operations and high availability.