Black powder contamination is a widely used term for a highly pervasive particulate contamination found in all hydrocarbon facilities and pipelines, water systems, petrochemical powders, and other fluid and gas systems.  All too often, its presence and negative impacts are accepted by industry as a cost of doing business. To prevent black powder from accumulating in systems and equipment, and allowing it to continue downstream, the goal for facility and pipeline operators should be first to eliminate the conditions for its development through proper root cause analysis and secondly to eliminate its presence as early as possible in the hydrocarbon value chain.  Managing black powder requires knowledge and acceptance of its formation process and presence, and a plan and equipment to remove it.

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In the lead up to the Operational Excellence in Oil & Gas Summit, we sat down with Hugo Ashkar, Global Risk Manager and Diane Chadwick-Jones, Director of Human Performance at BP to discuss how they are establishing a Human Performance framework at the global energy giant.  

Mr. Hutcherson is the CEO/Founder of Optimize Consulting, a organizational improvement firm providing strategic improvement solutions, which has been successful at improving federal and commercial organizations to include over $3 billion in cost savings plus has been associated with multiple improvement awards. Mr. Hutcherson created the “Organizational Optimization”ä methodology in 2006 and authored the book in 2014. He is a certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and Sr. Member of the American Society for Quality. He has a Master’s in Business Management and Bachelor’s in Industrial Engineering and is a U.S. Air Force veteran and ex-mayoral candidate.

Robert Hutcherson authored “Organizational Optimization” in 2014. This book presents a new approach to strategically optimizing your organization, not just improving it. It presents the new methodology and breaks down each potential category of optimization. It holistically assesses your organization in its current state, typically reactive and presents a path to a proactive agile future state. Organizational Optimization sets the path for strategic alignment and optimum execution throughout the organization. Categories of optimization are: strategy, performance, process, improvement, resources, financial, systems, knowledge, relationships, innovation, cultural, marketing and benchmarking. The book is available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

We teamed up with Software AG to survey over 200 operations leaders to understand how they are responding to today’s volatile market conditions and optimizing asset performance. 

Download this insightful industry report to discover:

• The specific actions that the oil and gas industry is currently taking to optimize its assets
• The barriers preventing oil and gas leaders from achieving their asset optimization goals
• Why predictive and prescriptive maintenance has become a critical priority for the C Suite
• How prepared oil and gas companies are for IoT, Cloud Services, Big Data and AI