CDN NEWS | 
US NEWS 
By: Robert Ohmes
As highlighted in Becht’s “Winners, Losers, and Everything in Between” and Energy Transition webinars, the Energy Industry has experienced unprecedented change in 2020 – lower and slower demand recovery putting pressure on gross margins, overcapacity leading to facility shutdowns, reductions in staffing levels, delays in turnaround maintenance, and cutbacks in capital budgets. These elements, as well as continued regulatory mandates and incentives, have also accelerated the need for refiners and petrochemical firms to progress their Sustainability / Energy Transition initiatives, particularly from a strategic and tactical basis.
In spite of the potential “gloom and doom”, there is hope on the horizon! Multiple COVID-19 vaccines have moved beyond clinical trials and are being distributed to at-risk individuals, health care workers, and other essential staff. Certain regions of the world, such as India, are running their facilities near pre-COVID throughputs. Facilities are now beginning to examine prioritizing and scheduling the once-delayed turnaround maintenance events and move beyond the cost cutting adjustments they had to make to achieve short term survival. No matter the drivers or causality, energy firms must be back to the core first principles of our industry – achieving safe, reliable, and profitable operation, and Becht is here to help to improve margin capture!
Within Becht, our heritage has always been to work with our clients to solve their most challenging problems, and this current state of the business is no different. Fundamentally, refiners and petrochemical entities must focus on near term cash generation to survive not only in the short term but also to generate the funding to meet capital demands for implementing their sustainability strategies to meet the significant transitions that that occurring in our industry. They need an agile response to identify and capture margin improvement as market opportunities present themselves, address a holistic operating strategy across a wide operating range from turndown to full capacity, manage around equipment constraints while retaining overall reliability, and enable effective decision-making by their staff.
To help our clients succeed, Becht has developed BRAVO (Becht Reliable Asset Value Optimization) to support and partner with the energy industry in generating cash while meeting their most pressing operational challenges.
BRAVO is built upon four key elements:
- Multidisciplinary Technical Expertise
- Practical Solutions
- Agile Execution
- Holistic Analysis
The core of BRAVO is based on Becht’s 55-year heritage of delivering multi-disciplinary solutions via our 1,500 global subject matter experts. Practical solutions mean that Becht is able to help analyze and address key equipment operational, design, and reliability elements that will liberate additional profit generation opportunities. Application of Becht’s agile Baseline, Examine, Confirm, Harness, and Track methodology, in collaboration with clients, helps quickly enable responsiveness and drives cash generation. Finally, Becht’s multi directional approach, in combination with “hard” engineering expertise, tools, and analytics, ensures that the identified value is holistic and real recoverable margin. Based on our experience, BRAVO is able to deliver between $0.10 and $0.75 per barrel of feedstock margin improvement, with more than a 10:1 benefit/cost ratio for our services.
Over the coming months, we will share more on the elements of BRAVO, including details on the approach, additional case studies, and implementable game plans. We, at Becht, live by our mantra of helping our clients solve their most difficult challenges with independent, objective, owner-operator perspective, and first principles technical expertise. We welcome the opportunity to work with you to improve your profitability.
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