Thought Leadership

OCI Beaumont is an integrated methanol and ammonia production facility that is located on the US Gulf Coast near Beaumont, Texas. It is the largest merchant methanol plant in North America, with a permitted annual production capacity of 730,000 metric tons of methanol and 265,000 metric tons of anhydrous ammonia.

Co-production of methanol and ammonia requires smooth and continuous operations of several large and complex equipment such as furnaces, catalytic reactors compressors, turbines, pumps, distillation towers and a train of heat exchangers spread across the plant. Over the life cycle of the plant this equipment can fail either due to normal wear and tear or quite often due to sub-optimal operations or maintenance practices.

To avoid unplanned downtime of OCI Beaumont’s plant and to optimize steady-state operations, KBR is currently cloud-hosting the INSITE® remote monitoring and advisory service platform (KBR Remote monitoring at OCI Beaumont) to proactively collaborate with plant personnel and provide them with timely recommendations based on deep domain knowledge.

KBR INSITE® represents the underlying building-block on top of which several tools and solutions can be layered to facilitate a customer’s requirements during their digital journey. Many such solutions are provided through partnership with technology vendors or obtained through cloud-hosting service providers. KBR’s objective is to support a proper gap analysis of OCI Beaumont’s portfolio and then recommend the selection of digital technologies that would help OCI Beaumont achieve their targets for sustainability, energy efficiency and low carbon utilization. Travel restrictions caused by the ongoing global pandemic has made it difficult for KBR and OCI Beaumont to conduct face-to-face meetings to discuss the selection and adoption of digital solutions that would bring most value to OCI Beaumont.

To address this need, KBR leverages AWS Advanced Tier Partnership to access a suite of digital solutions applicable across the value chain, from remote operations and optimization, trip avoidance, collaboration and much more.   Moreover, to effectively interact with OCI Beaumont during this period of restricted travel,  KBR has developed a customer experience environment on AWS that provides a virtual reality setting to showcase digital offerings through 3D models, videos, live presentations, posters, and banners.

OCI Beaumont has been invited to enter a series of VR/AR settings; and interact with both information presented in these settings as well as with KBR experts, almost as if they were physically visiting the KBR premises. KBR schedules these collaboration sessions periodically so that the functionality and value proposition of various advanced applications can be reviewed in detail with customers. This allows KBR to take the role of a “Trusted Advisor” to continuously elevate the customer’s maturity level in their digital transformation journey and expand their use of KBR’s digital services to enhance the operations of their plant.