bp made significant safety improvements at its Cherry Point refinery as part of major turnaround activities.
Cherry Point installed new remotely controlled valves at its coker unit that are designed to help make refining operations safer. Workers can now remotely empty the coke drums, containers that convert heavy oil residues into petroleum coke, mitigating risks and enhancing worker safety.
This work is aligned with bp’s commitment under its February 2025 strategy reset to deliver improvement in refinery resilience and competitiveness.
Karen Miller, vice president of Cherry Point refinery, said: “We are thrilled to engineer solutions that improve safe operations for our employees. Our maintenance, engineering and operations teams have been deeply involved with these improvements and are looking forward to operating the new equipment.”
The work was completed as part of a major crude and coker turnaround that involved maintenance and project activities at Cherry Point, involving more than 2,800 contractors working 1.5 million work-hours, which aimed to improve safety and integrity of equipment and processes at the refinery. The refinery continued to operate safely at partial capacity while safety and reliability improvements were made to the coker unit.
bp plans to improve global refining competitiveness and reliability with an aim to consistently achieve availability at 96% or above. This will be enabled by further turnaround efficiencies as bp drives standardized work management, scope optimization and sharing of learnings and expertise across the production and operations portfolio.
bp's Cherry Point refinery is the largest in Washington state with the ability to process more than 250,000 barrels of crude oil per day.
bp expects to achieve a sustainable reduction of around $3 per barrel in the operating cash breakeven of its refining portfolio by 2027.
