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ASARCO was organized in 1899 as American Smelting And Refining Company. Originally a consolidation of a number of lead-silver smelting companies, the Company has evolved over the years into an integrated producer of copper, and other metals.
The Company is a fully integrated miner, smelter and refiner of copper in the United States. ASARCO’s domestic mines annually produce approximately 350 - 400 million pounds of copper. Significant copper mines include the Mission, Silver Bell and the Ray open-pit mines, all three in Arizona.
ASARCO has solvent extraction/electrowinning product at its Ray and Silver Bell mines in Arizona. ASARCO operates copper smelters in Hayden, Arizona, and El Paso, Texas, which combined produce in excess of a billion pounds of anodes annually. Operations at the El Paso smelter were suspended in February 1999. The Company’s Amarillo Copper Refinery in Texas and the SX/EW plants at the Ray and Silver Bell mines produce about 375 million pounds of refined copper per year.
The ASARCO Amarillo Copper Refinery at its inception was the world’s largest copper refinery. Since then, the refinery went through a number of expansions phases and enhancements/modifications. All these expansions and modifications had left the refinery in a collage of production and automation technologies that were not communicative to each other. The lack of communication yielded in a lack of transparency and hence no single version of truth for the management to track and plan their production performance by.
The instruments and controls department had recently started standardizing on a single PLC from Rockwell, but it was to take them years before the entire refinery could have been standardized on the same controller. The production department needed reports and performance metrics as fast as they possibly could.
Jim Williams with the consent of his production and maintenance team opted to use IntelliMAX Plant to bring the entire plant floor to a single version of truth. The following steps were taken to accomplish this task:
- The project started from the ACR Rod Line where the current RSView and InTouch softwares were complementary with IntelliMAX as operator interface.
- However, IntelliMAX, due to its versatility, would act as much more than a simple HMI and would gather data straight from the controller, have it historized, calculate parameters and tabulate reports on them serving them on demand, time based, and event based.
- The through and through OPC capability of IntelliMAX allowed for it to fetch data from a multitude of controllers thus saving ASARCO substantive savings in immediate cash outflow.
- The Concurrent Multi Client Multi Server Architecture allowed ASARCO management to access their reports and trends on their laptops not only while sitting anywhere in the plants facility but also through accessing the VPN from anywhere in the world.
www.asarco.com
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