Optimizing Chevron’s Refineries

Chevron has developed a software modeling tool that its 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 is a linear program with distributive recursion mathematics, which Chevron uses in operations and strategic planning. Over the past 30-plus years, the company has continually improved this application of operations research, and its complementary and supporting systems and business processes, and they are now deeply embedded into the fabric of Chevron’s downstream business of reliably and efficiently supplying products 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.