Despite the great inertia against organizational movement, I was able to change roles early last year. Just as I was considering the possibility of jumping ship to Caltex in the spring, I was offered a new job on the BP Coke Marketing team located just down the road from the refinery [in Carson, CA] in Huntington Beach, CA. BP has a group of a dozen people in this satellite office (complete with pilot and analytical labs) marketing all of its worldwide petroleum coke product.
The vast majority of the work is done on the calcined coke side of things, of which BP is a major global player (currently ranked third in the western world in production behind wholesalers Oxbox and RainCII).
My refinery, the Carson Refinery, has an associated petcoke calciner which is also included in the divestment, and I was brought in to support all things technical for the new three-person team solely dedicated to the Carson refinery; all three of us are still ring-fenced (we will not be staying with BP). My background as the process engineer for the refinery's two coker units made me a good fit. In this role, I basically cover anything the logistics guy and my manager (who handles the sales and finance side) don't: I am on the refinery crude purchase team and an specifically responsible for maintaining coke (both green and calcined) quality while also trying to maximize refinery crude opportunities/margin; I own and maintain the coke quality model, which predicts coke properties from crude assay data; I serve as a technical resource to the refinery's current coker process engineer (my replacement) and the calciner's process engineer; I provide yield and quality predictions to the other two guys on my team so they know what and when to sell. The most exciting part of my role is that I am the technical contact for our aluminium smelting customers.
I regularly call and visit our worldwide aluminium smelting customers to discuss and troubleshoot any perceived problems with our product. The travel is fun for me right now: in the lat few months, I was able to travel to Switzerland and Brazil, and this year I plan to travel to Australia and Dubai. While I am far from an expert, I am well-versed in the aluminium smelting process now. The frequent technical conversations with our customers regarding their process and my product is a key part of our value proposition, something which the Chinese do not offer. It's neat, it's different, and the hours are much better than my process engineering days.
