Digital automation

Sweechee Lee, general manager of Emerson Process Management China, outlines the successful implemetation of plant-wide digital automation at the $2.7 billion Shanghai SECCO Petrochemical Complex.

Emerson Process Management undertook the huge task of providing the digital automation at one of the largest integrated petrochemical complexes in China. Shanghai SECCO Petrochemical Company selected Emerson as its digital automation partner for the $2.7 billion, 10-plant ethylene cracker complex.

Located in the Shanghai Chemical Industrial Park about 50 kilometres from Shanghai, the complex will annually produce 900,000 tonns of ethylene and more than 2 million tonnes of other related petrochemical products used in the plastics and synthetics industries.

The ethylene cracker, SECCO's core plant in the complex, is the largest in China, and among the largest in the world. SECCO used the engineering and project management of Emerson to integrate and co-ordinate multiple suppliers, enabling completion of the complex - from bare ground to a fully functional world-class facility, in just 27 months, achieving completion three months ahead of schedule. Start-up of the ethylene cracker plant in March 2005 took just 10 hours, 45 minutes, a world record, according to SECCO, for a project of this magnitude.

"Our facilities and expert personnel at Pudong enabled us to partner effectively with SECCO, shaping a cutting edge solution," said Sweechee Lee, general manager, Emerson Process Management China.

"We were also able to call upon Emerson experts among our more than 4,000 global engineering and technical service professionals, particularly from centres in India and Singapore."

Emerson installed PlantWeb digital architecture throughout the SECCO complex, which contains 47,000 control loops, 40,000 instruments, and some 13,000 intelligent devices networked in the world's largest Foundation fieldbus installation.

Fieldbus is an all-digital, open communications approach that connects measurement and control equipment such as sensors, actuators and controllers in processing applications.

Rather than using a centralised project organisation run by an overall project contractor, SECCO - a joint venture between Innovene (formerly BP), Sinopec, and Shanghai Petrochemical Corporation (SPC) - chose an integrated project management team approach, under which each key plant in the complex had a lead project contractor.

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