Salmons did not waste any time after he graduated from West Virginia University with a degree in Civil Engineering, and moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to work for Mesta Machine as a design engineer preparing drawings and performing and checking calculations on structures. “Essentially, they built steel mills, however, that line of work was fading at that point, and I was only there for about three years,” Salmons recalls. “I decided to move back to my home state of West Virginia, where I worked for about 12 to 13 years in a couple of different job positions. One of my last positions in West Virginia, was a design engineer preparing drawings and designs for DuPont. I was on contract and worked at the various plants in the West Virginia area.”
Salmons then moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, and continued to work under another contract office for Du-Pont. During his time at the Charlotte office, Salmons received an offer to work for DuPont as a Project/ Design Engineer in Delaware, where the company was headquartered.
“After working in the Delaware office for close to a year, I realized that I was one of three guys that had just been hired, and the next person was a experienced DuPont employee that had 15 to 17 years of experience working direct for DuPont. It looked like work was going to phase out, and I decided to look elsewhere,” Salmons explains.
He interviewed and received an offer for the position of Design/Project Engineer in Oklahoma for the oil company Conoco, which was owned by DuPont at that time. “I came to Oklahoma and was at Conoco for 26 years before I retired.”
Working at Conoco
During his 26 years, Salmons spent his first seven years in the Conoco office, where he gained experience in design and project work. “Eventually, I moved to the refinery and worked as an Area Engineer, where I helped with turnarounds, maintenance and project start-ups. After around seven years of working at the refinery, I moved back to the office I had started in.”
As a Project Engineer and a Project Man-ager, Salmons applied his experience to maintenance style projects, which he called a ‘cradle to grave’ project. “For these projects, someone would come up with an idea or improvement, and would tell us what type of problems these solutions could be applied to,” he explains. “From there, we would work with a project team and figure out how to do what they needed, how to get the money approved, how to get the money budgeted and do the project, and then we would help supervise with construction toward the end. A lot of the time, I would work on projects being installed during turnarounds, and sometimes I would go out and assist with the turn-around, and it was as if I was doing my old job as an Area Engineer.”
Salmons describes the most challenging part of his job was getting the projects approved through the budget cycle.
“Like I said before, we did our projects cradle to grave. At times, the hard part was getting your project to the point where your managers have prioritized and approved it. Too often you would get a project and it would continue to get put off, or not get approved at all,” Salmons explains. “I did quite a few estimates, did a lot of work on some things that did not get done because they were either not as good of an idea as we thought it was going to be and as we developed it, or it was not really what the refinery needed at the time. They needed other things instead.”
In order to meet the deadlines for these projects, Salmons recalls having to fight and push for the solutions the project team would come up with, “we would have to twist their idea or their input into it, just to get it approved.”
Working with Valves
The world of valves is a vast one, and Salmons gained experience with a variety of different types while he worked at Conoco. “I would say early in my career, the only one that was used was what I call, the standard valves. It was something you would go buy off the shelf everyday. However, the longer I was in the industry, it seemed like there was more being offered,” Salmons says. “There was an awful lot of specialty valves that we installed. There was a knife gate valve that we would use to isolate a knockout drum during a turn-around so it would keep a flare system going. We had one called the Vanessa valve that would provide sealing and would therefore, minimize leaks. Once I moved to the refinery I started working with several large valves, a majority made by Tapco, that are actuator-driven. I also worked on some large ball valves and a coking system that had mechanical actuators. We went in and replaced a portion of them, and got the rest re-built and had them set up, so that for future turnarounds, they could be easily repaired.”
When the company was faced with a damaged valve, a few factors would determine whether it got repaired or replaced.
“You have to keep in mind that some-times, when you replace a valve, it may not fit back to where it was. You have to go back in and work on it, because a lot of the time we’re talking about a 12, 14, 24, 36, or 40-inch valve. You need to know that sometimes you won’t be able to fix the underlying issues and decide whether your underlying problems are bad enough to warrant purchasing new valves.”
Choosing Stainless
Working in the fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) unit at Conoco, Salmons dealt with an abundance of stainless-steel applications. “The big thing with stain-less applications, was we had to be sure we did not have any stainless cracking, or any other issues, and we would ensure this by the way we did the project.”
Project designs and drawings need to be as specific as possible. They must outline how metallurgy applications would be taken care of how they would be installed, how they would be hydrotested as they were being worked with, and most importantly, that it met the standards and requirements for the specified application.
“Sometimes when you use stainless steel, you spend a lot more money for it. The other option you could go with is carbon steel, however, that poses many more questions,” Salmons explains. “How good is carbon steel going to be? What is the difference? What are you getting for your money? You have to evaluate that. You have to evaluate what problems you are going to have if something happens in the process.”
A majority of the time, Salmons ex-plains they chose stainless steel as op-posed to carbon steel because of stain-less’ temperature capabilities.
The process itself, is also a huge factor when it comes to deciding what type of steel to use, “Maybe the process was going to cause corrosion. In those cases, you certainly should be using stain-less. If you do choose stainless, you would want the 304, the 316, or maybe even an alternate metallurgy. It all de-pended on which stainless was best for the specified application.” The metallurgy of the valves was mainly based on temperature and corrosion exposure for the process. Conoco/Phillips 66 is fortunate to have excellent Metallurgist/Engineers to help with selection of piping, valves and vessel applications.
In some cases, the team would decide to even use chrome instead of stainless steel, after working out the costs and how long the application would last. “In the coker, on a heater, we specified tubes that were much higher metallurgy of chrome, but they allowed the coke to spall off instead of having to pig the tubes as often. On top of how beneficial these tubes made of chrome would be to the coker, we saw how much money it would save us on the operation for the heater even with the longer delivery for the tubes.”
The Future of the Industry
As a recent retiree, Bill has noticed that there is a gap in the industry, as far as talent is concerned, with people not coming in to transfer the knowledge onto the younger generation, and that people who are retiring are taking that knowledge with them. “In the last 5 to 10 years, you could virtually see it. It is not just engineers in this industry either, it’s in all industries. However, in the oil industry, it can be challenging to find people who are willing to do the type of work that needs to be done in a refinery, or work with various industrial application issues. It is finding those people to work in these types of jobs, that can pose a problem,” Salmons ex-plains. “With a lot of people retiring, and a lot of the experience gone, it is forcing companies to.
He explains that many of the people who are retiring now, are people who trained during the war, and when they came back, had skills but not jobs. “They would go through training, and eventually found jobs. Now the situation is that a lot of that capability has gone out the door, and it is different now. College or a junior college is a bigger option that people go toward, however it is just a different set up, and I think it will all come together and work out.”