A Journey Towards Operational Excellence – From Effective Plant Performance Monitoring to Capturing Opportunities

Since being commissioned in June 2009 and being the largest crude increment program undertaken in recent history, Saudi Aramco’s Khurais Central Processing Facility (KhCPF) has positioned itself for a greater leap by embarking on various operational excellence initiatives. This includes various optimization initiatives ranging from maximizing crude yield to optimizing energy efficiency performance. Nonetheless, to ensure a sustainable optimum performance following the implementation of these initiatives, which proves to be the greatest challenge for the facility, an in-house engineering dashboard was created to provide engineers and operations with plant performance monitoring capabilities. To reinforce this drive for operational excellence, a multidisciplinary team member task force was formed with the objective of realizing the opportunities identified during the process improvement. The focus of the task force is to capture “low hanging fruit” opportunities that can be implemented immediately and require little or no cost. Today, after implementing these initiatives, the KhCPF is realizing the benefits of the operational excellence initiatives in the most sustainable way and has achieved significant improvement in the plant energy performance index by 3% and enhanced its crude recovery by around 0.2% without incurring any capital cost. Such value creation initiatives do not stop the task force from setting out on a journey of continuous improvement as part of its ongoing operational excellence effort.