Optimizing Chevron’s Refineries
Chevron has developed a software modeling tool that seven company-owned refineries use to select the most profitable raw materials, evaluate product options, optimize refinery processes, and promote efficient capital investments. The tool, now called Petro, is a linear program with distributive recursion mathematics. This application of operations research, along with its complementary and supporting systems and work processes, have been continually improved upon over the past thirty-plus years and are now deeply embedded into the fabric of Chevron's downstream business of supplying products reliably and efficiently to our customers. The value that these efforts bring to Chevron now approaches $1 billion annually. We estimate that the cumulative value to Chevron over the past three decades is approximately $10 billion.