Context
Jamnagar is the largest oil refinery on Earth — 1.25 million barrels per day. At Control Headquarters, our principal worked the maintenance side of the machines that keep it turning, focused on the lube-oil systems protecting its rotating equipment.
The problem
Lube oil is cheap; what it protects is not. Change it too often and cost climbs across thousands of assets — too rarely and you gamble with compressors and turbines. The refinery’s plans were safe but not sharp, and at Jamnagar’s scale, “not sharp” is expensive.
What we built
The work started where all honest plant engineering starts: the P&IDs. A systematic review of the piping and instrumentation across the lube system, matched against how maintenance actually ran, surfaced where practice diverged from design intent.
From that, a revised maintenance strategy: oil-life extension grounded in the system’s real behavior, with the cost impact modeled and held under a 10% increase.
Key decisions
Trusting the drawings over the defaults. Vendor-recommended intervals assume an average plant; Jamnagar is not an average plant. Strategy derived from the actual system beat strategy inherited from a manual.
Outcome
A maintenance strategy that extends oil life at bounded cost — and an early proof of the JES method for heavy industry: go to the plant, read the drawings, and let the system tell you where the money is.