Playing it safe

Since last year's dramatic fire at the Hertfordshire oil depot in Buncefield, there has been a renewed focus on process plant safety - particularly in the petrochemical industry.

All the key players in the field -

,

,

,

,

and

- have safety functionality built into their own proprietary platforms, but now more than ever this is becoming a product differentiator.

Emerson has won a contract with leading North American natural gas producer

to apply its PlantWeb digital plant architecture to automate EnCana's Steeprock natural gas processing plant in

.

The approach, integrating basic process control with a smart Safety Instrumented System (SIS), is designed to assist in processing 190 million cu ft/day of raw gas and will consist of two main components.

The first comprises two amine plants, one to remove CO

from the raw sweet feed gas, and the second to remove CO

and H