Success Stories / NGL Processing
Unit Optimization Service · NGL Processing
Tuning PIDs associated with just eight control valves at a 120,000 barrel/day NGL processing plant reduced valve output travel by an average of 66%. That cut the five-year downtime exposure for servicing those same valves from $1.8 million to $600K, a $1.2 million savings over five years.
~$500K
Annual gain per machine from a 10-point OCE recovery
The challenge
Acid gas removal sits directly upstream of every dollar an NGL plant earns. The amine circuit that strips CO2 and H2S from inlet gas is a tightly interactive unit operation: contactor pressure, lean amine flow, reboiler duty, and flash and reflux levels all pull on one another, and each is regulated by a PID loop driving a control valve. Left untuned, that interaction quietly erodes plant economics loop by loop.
Valve reliability alone puts a hard number on that erosion: reducing a handful of control valves' Output Travel through tuning can save roughly $240,000 a year in avoided repacking, replacement, and downtime. That's just one line item. Lift a sweetening unit's overall OCE score by just 10 points and the combined savings from valve life, reduced reprocessing, and energy and chemical use can reach $500,000 a year.
Where the losses originate
Service downtime
Excess valve Output Travel drives repacking, replacement, and the outages that come with them.
Off-spec product
CO2 and H2S carryover forces reprocessing or sale at a discount.
Energy waste
Reboiler steam is the unit's largest variable cost; loose control overheats the still.
Water & chemicals
Wash water and makeup chemical consumption climb as circulation destabilizes.
Amine loss
Foaming and carryover send costly amine out of the circuit with the treated gas.
Downtime exposure derived from an evaluation of 108 PID loops at a 120,000 barrel/day NGL processing facility; eight documented valve loops, average 66% reduction in output travel. Repacking, replacement, and lost-revenue figures reflect that facility's own cost basis; actual results vary with unit configuration and starting baseline.
Overall Controller Effectiveness · A Universal Performance Measure
The connection between PID performance and the economics of NGL processing is not theoretical. PlantESPâ„¢ is the leading control loop performance monitoring (CLPM) solution. PlantESP actively monitors PID performance on a plant-wide basis, and it has been successfully deployed on dozens of paper machines.
Among its metrics, PlantESP scores every loop using Overall Controller Effectiveness (OCE). Like OEE, OCE is a composite KPI that assesses three operating attributes (Availability, Performance, Quality) and facilitates the benchmarking of individual PID loops, unit operations, and entire facilities.
≥ 95%
Availability
Time in Normal (auto/cascade)
≥ 90%
Performance
Time Not Saturated (off limits)
≥ 85%
Quality
% Good Error within tolerance
Overall Controller Effectiveness =
Time in Normal × Time Not Saturated × % Good Error
A loop meeting all three thresholds scores 72.7%, the threshold for world-class control. Because the terms multiply, a loop running only 80/80/80 falls to 51.2%. OCE highlights weakness in any one dimension, which is why it gauges control quality and financial exposure alike. Try the OCE calculator
Framing poor performance as lost profit
66%
Avg reduction in valve Output Travel
$90.5K
Lost revenue/hour of downtime at max capacity
$1.8M → $600K
Five-year downtime exposure for valve service
$1.2M
Five-year savings from eight loops alone
A project-based, control-strategy-improvement offering purpose-built for interactive, multi-loop unit operations like a amine sweetening train. Engage to find and fix the losses, then sustain the gains. Explore the service →
Engage · 01–04
01 Kick-off
Prioritize by Strategy
Rank loops, units, and areas against the plant's own goals: spec, energy, throughput.
02 Monthly
Identify Bad Actors
Control Station engineers pinpoint that scope's top 10 bad-actor loops every month.
03 Monthly
Tune the Loops
Four hours per month of direct, hands-on tuning support to resolve those loops.
04 As needed
Strategy Change
When tuning cannot close the gap, escalate to a more strategic assessment and action plan.
Sustain · Ongoing
Quarterly
Assess the Value
Financial impact of the 10–20% typical Percent Good Error (PGE) gain from resolved bad-actor tuning.
Monthly
Track OCE Live
Unit Operation Performance Indicators in PlantESP keep the OCE trend visible.
Quarterly
Report to Stakeholders
Benchmark against industry peers for sponsors and non-technical stakeholders.
Annual
Plan the Roadmap
Update a one-to-three year plan for closing whatever performance gap remains.
Keep reading
Decades of domain expertise
Control Station is the process industry's leading provider of controller performance monitoring and analytics. PlantESPâ„¢ supports hundreds of facilities worldwide, backed by an engineering team focused solely on process control.
Contact us for a no-obligation loop performance assessment and a plant-specific estimate of the opportunity hidden in your regulatory controls.
Request an AssessmentEnter your details and we’ll send benchmark results comparing your plant against data from 150+ production facilities.
"*" indicates required fields
