Yokogawa Electric Corp. has been selected as the main automation contractor for Chevron Phillips Chemical Co. LP's USGC petrochemicals project. The project, initiated March 2011, will include a 3.3 billion pounds-per-year (1.5 million metric tons-per-year) ethane cracker and two new polyethylene facilities, each with an annual capacity of 1.1 billion pounds (500,000 metric tons).
 

The ethane cracker will be built at Chevron Phillips Chemical's Cedar Bayou plant in Baytown, Texas, and two polyethylene units will be built at a site in Old Ocean, Texas, near Chevron Phillips Chemical's Sweeny plant. Construction is expected to start in early 2014.
 

Yokogawa will supply the control systems, safety systems, remote instrument enclosures, analyzer shelters and analytical systems. The control system platform will be based on Yokogawa's Centum VP integrated production control system. While Yokogawa notes that Centum VP is classified as a distributed control system (DCS), it offers an interface and a large-capacity field control station to process data faster. The dual-redundant configuration of processor cards combined with pairing each processor card with two CPUs (in a pair-and-spare configuration) ensures uninterrupted operations and high availability.