Elizabeth Neath

5.20 AM

Wake up, get showered, have breakfast and drive to work.  

6.30 AM

Arrive at work, prepare for asset morning meetings - read shift handover notes and monitor trends of plant performance overnight, investigate abnormal plant conditions or process events.

7.00 AM

Dial in to operations morning meeting with onshore LNG facility.  Run by the operations manager and attended by representatives from safety, operations, process, instrumentation, electrical, mechanical, planning, maintenance and logistics, this meeting updates everyone on the last 24 hours production, discusses the work planned for the day and highlights any process events or conditions that need further monitoring by the operations support centre. 

7.30 AM

Offshore facility morning operations update.  Like the 7am meeting just with the added logistical complication of being in the middle of the ocean. 

8.00 AM

Trip to the coffee shop down the road.

8.30 AM

Development of online monitoring tools to assess plant performance during process trials. Aim is to optimise efficiency and better understand plant limitations and constraints. Involves a lot of data analysis and is a great opportunity to whip out Perry’s and refresh the theories and equations from uni.

10.30 AM

Run through process safety time results of dynamic Hysys simulation with senior engineer.

10.32 AM

Plant trips – investigate cause of trip.  Looking at trends of operating conditions leading up to trip and assessing if there is a process or control solution to prevent it from happening again. 

12.00 PM

Lunch.

12.30 PM

Check plant operations and trial trends to ensure everything is running smoothly. Check in with site engineers to keep updated of what’s going on and if there is any further support required.  

1.00 PM

Project update meeting – conference call with environmental team and modelling consultants to provide feedback on model outcomes.  My role is to provide process and operations support for the project in support of a new environmental license condition.  For this meeting we have just realised that some of the assumptions from the latest round of models were incorrect and will need to be re-run taking us uncomfortably close to the project deadline. 

2.00 PM

Run through process safety time results of dynamic Hysys simulation with senior engineer.  

3.00 PM

Check plant operation and plant trial trends. Notice compressors are not running on performance curves – a lengthy perusal through the document management system didn’t yield any better data, a mystery for another day.

4.00 PM

Quitting time.

4.30 PM

Head to the pool, signing up for the Busselton Jetty swim seemed like a good idea all those months ago.

6.00 PM

Knock back some dinner at home and head out again for a dance before doing it all again tomorrow.