Engineer saves me money!!!

Do you need a plant engineer? In most cases I would say yes. But the choice you make determines if they make you money or cost you money. Of course this is true for any position you fill, but a good plant engineer will make you money.

At one time most plants had a dedicated engineer. The drive over the years to reduce operating costs has led to the area engineer. Instead of being responsible for one plant, they are now responsible for an area that may include 5 or more plants. This has put a time constraint on how much time an engineer can dedicate to any one plant. Drive time alone can be a significant portion of an engineer’s time. Then there are the inevitable reports that must be written. There must be accountability, and some measure of progress or success, but this should be balanced against time required to prepare a report and the actual usefulness of that report. It has been my experience that the time required is underestimated because the request comes from someone who has not tried to complete a similar report.

I guess one of my points is that you can have a very good plant engineer, but if he spends his time driving and writing reports and maybe managing million dollar projects on the side, he may not have the time to sit down and work with operations to improve plant performance.

On the other hand, there are times when the plant engineer truly costs you money. Take for instance the cryogenic gas plant that is shut down because the liquid product is off specification. The NGL is supposed to be a propane plus product, but due to high ethane content, the liquids pipeline company has shut down the plant. Now what is one to do with a NGL surge tank full of off specification product? One engineer decided the best thing to do would be to drain all of that liquid to the flare prior to the restart of the plant.

Aside from all of the problems created by draining this liquid to flare, (surprise, there is water in the flare knock out drum that he should have known about and NGL tends to get colder than ice when vented to atmospheric pressure), this is simply money down the drain. A better alternative would have been to vent the surge drum to flare until the vapor pressure was decreased to a salable product. The volume would be reduced by the vented volume, but the remaining liquid could have been sold for real revenue.

Assume a standard bullet with 18,000 gallons total capacity half full. That is 9,000 gallons of liquid down the drain, or, if we assume 10% of volume vented off, 8,100 gallons of product. If I assume the NGL is worth $2 per gallon, about half the price of oil at $90 per barrel, then you either lose $18,000 or you make $16,200. That is the kind of money a good engineer can make you in a plant!

There are other more complex solutions to the issue that could have saved even the vented gas, but nothing simple that could be easily done in the few days between plant shut down and planned restart of the plant.