Automation contractor appointed!

Yokogawa has been selected as the Main Automation Contractor for Chevron Phillips Chemical Company LP’s (Chevron Phillips Chemical) USGC Petrochemicals Project. The project was first announced in March 2011 and will include a 1.5 million metric tons/year (3.3 billion pounds/year) ethane cracker and two new polyethylene facilities, each with an annual capacity of 500,000 metric tons (1.1 billion pounds).

The ethane cracker will be built at Chevron Phillips Chemical’s Cedar Bayou plant in Baytown (TX USA), and two polyethylene units will be built at a site in Old Ocean, TX near Chevron Phillips Chemical’s Sweeny plant. The USGC Petrochemicals 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 U.S. in a very long time,” says Chet Mroz, President and CEO of Yokogawa Corporation of America.

As the Main Automation Contractor for the project, 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 highly reliable 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 exceedingly high reliability. The dual-redundant configuration of processor cards combined with pairing each processor card with two CPUs (pair & spare configuration) ensures uninterrupted operations and high availability.