Emerson partners with the energy industry to recover dead money

With volatile, low energy prices widely believed to be the “new normal”, companies must look for new ways to stay competitive and profitable. In most cases, those opportunities are found within their own capital construction projects and operations, where outdated standards and status quo processes have resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars in “dead money” that can be recovered and saved or put to better use.

At IHS CERAWeek 2016, Emerson has announced Top Quartile Performance, a commitment to partner with energy industry executives to help them achieve operations and capital performance in the top 25% of their peers, while continuing to drive benchmark performance expectations higher. Emerson has built its business helping forward-looking operators achieve top quartile performance by finding sources of dead money in both new projects and existing operations, then applying advanced automation technologies and innovative business processes to realise cost savings and competitive advantages.

Research from Solomon Associates and Independent Project Analysis (IPA), Inc demonstrates the staggering differences between top quartile performers and those operating in the lower quartiles in areas like project performance, reliability and energy efficiency. For example:

• The cost of a typical US$1 billion-scope project is more than $1.6 billion for operators in the fourth quartile of project performance, while top quartile performers will complete the same scope for $750 million.
• Maintenance costs are more than tripled for fourth-quartile performers in reliability when compared to top quartile performers.
• In energy efficiency, fourth quartile companies see both fuel costs and emissions that are double those of top quartile performers.

“The energy industry has reached a crisis in terms of capital, operational and financial performance, and efforts to simply tweak traditional approaches and ‘run lean’ aren’t delivering results in the current business environment,” said Emerson Chairman and Chief Executive Officer David N Farr. “Emerson partners with industry leaders to look beyond outdated standards and deliver the radical improvements needed to get the most out of every capital investment. Focusing on top quartile performance strategies will help executives across the globe achieve better return on assets and deliver shareholder value.”

Based on the Solomon, IPA and other research and data, Emerson estimates that process industries could save upwards of US$50 billion in wasted maintenance costs alone, plus more than $10 billion in energy costs, even at today’s prices. At the same time, the industry is wasting staggering sums — an estimated $430 billion — in poorly executed [capital] projects.

Emerson’s expertise in helping companies achieve high performance is built from decades of automation leadership, providing technologies, consulting and services to radically improve project and operational effectiveness. Emerson’s Top Quartile Performance initiative comes at a time when automation technology, real-time diagnostics and the IIoT are all advancing at a pace that renders decades-old project and operational practices obsolete. While best practices are often touted as the solution to poor performance, it is time for transformational thinking and action.

Emerson experts work with customers to take full advantage of these advanced new tools to plan new projects for top quartile performance, minimising the likelihood of cost overruns or schedule delays. To maximise the performance of existing operations, Emerson works with customers to engineer and deploy robust automation technologies to improve their real-time insight into process performance and equipment health. Data from these devices is connected via plant networks or the IIoT to provide real-time diagnostics on plant performance, empowering customers to detect inefficiencies, maximise safety, identify and fix potential problems before they result in costly unplanned downtime and predict future operational needs.

To support industry learning about top quartile performance opportunities, Emerson is launching an online resource for industry leaders to learn more about the technologies, process improvements and specific focus areas that can lead to streamlined operations and increased flexibility to adjust to shifting market demands. Additional relevant content from reporters at The Wall Street Journal and IndustryWeek is available at a digital hub on wsj.com.

For more information on Emerson’s participation at the 2016 IHS CERAWeek conference, visit http://www.EmersonProcess.com/CERAWeek2016.