Boosting business at Baglan Bay

At Baglan Bay, BP Chemicals' Isopropanol (IPA) plant is to receive utility services from a new CHP power station, and as a result the original BP-operated power plant with its DCS control and monitoring system will be demolished.

As discrete single loop controls and separate 'islands of automation' are moved over to the centralised DeltaV process automation system, the latter's flexibility will allow continued production through the phased transfer of plant control. The DeltaV system is to be located in a new 'off plant' control room, a requirement from the Health and Safety Executive. The objective of installing the Asset Management Solutions (AMS) software is to manage plant maintenance effectively, and capitalise on the powerful pre-emptive diagnostic ability of AMS.

Experience of HART- enabled instrumentation on the existing plant has shown the benefits and savings possible in using digital communications in interrogation and re-configuration. HART digital communications across the plant to these intelligent instruments provides the AMS software with data for plant performance monitoring, and enables more efficient immediate action direct from the control room. Using this information within AMS allows site maintenance people to identify causes of problems without lengthy site visits and troubleshooting within plant hazardous areas.

'We already have experience of using HART in local equipment loops, for trouble- shooting instrumentation from several manufacturers,' said David Davies, the BP Chemicals senior engineer, 'but the DeltaV architecture and AMS software will allow us to interrogate such equipment across the whole plant from the control room, improving the efficiency of our maintenance effort.

In addition AMS will give us trend data and help identify potential problems, allowing us to anticipate required maintenance. In the future we will use the advanced control functions and model predictive control embedded within DeltaV to improve the efficiency and performance of the plant itself.'

Much of the 1000-acre site, which has housed petrochemical plant over the last 30 years, is being redeveloped as the Baglan Energy Park. This will be supplied with steam and power from the new 500MW CCGT/CHP power station, which uses the General Electric 'H' system gas-powered turbine from GE Power Systems.

Transfers of steam, power and other utility services between the BP IPA plant and the CHP plant will be invoiced based on measurements made by MicroMotion Coriolis mass flowmeters, and other Rosemount instrumentation.