Modern Technology Builds a Better Polyethylene Plant

Take a closer look at how our polyethylene plant’s maintenance, infrastructure, and customer technologies improve supply chain reliability and make life easier for converters.

Our plant enables reliability, innovation

Are you a plastics converter looking for a reliable and innovative polymer supplier? Look no further than Shell Polymers' new polyethylene plant in Monaca, Pennsylvania.

Untethered by outdated legacy systems that can constrain older plants, our state-of-the-art facility is leveraging advanced technologies and data capabilities to improve supply chain reliability and offer better ways of operating.

We designed our plant, which is now operational and qualifying resins for customers, with converters top-of-mind.

This customer-first ethos is central to how Shell Polymers is redefining supplier-converter interaction in the plastics industry. We describe this approach to business as building (Real)ationships.

Maintaining Uptime With Advanced Technology

For converters, one of the biggest challenges is maintaining resin reliability and availability. Unplanned downtime can have far-reaching consequences, leading to lost production costs and a potential hit to brand reputation.

That's why Yolanda Walker, IT Innovation Lead at Shell Polymers, is focused on utilizing advanced technology and data capabilities to help achieve these goals.

The Monaca plant’s predictive maintenance program is a prime example of this effort. By combining embedded sensors, analytic models, and artificial intelligence, the program can detect issues before they develop into full-blown equipment failures. These sensors track key variables such as temperature, pressure, and vibration, while AI algorithms learn to identify when issues are developing.

As a result, the plant can avert trips and failures in critical equipment, improving reliability and availability.

By setting aggressive targets and leveraging leading-edge tools, Shell Polymers draws on expertise from across the larger Shell network of companies to help customers achieve their goals.

Discover Why Converters Should Diversify Their Supplier Pool with Shell Polymers

A Polyethylene Plant That Offers Shelter From the Storm

Supplier disruptions due to hurricanes and other storms are a difficult reality for converters. Shell Polymers built its plant to reduce the chances of those challenges to supply reliability.

Beyond our plant’s digital and internal infrastructure, the facility’s very design, too, is meant to better serve converters.

For example, the majority of the facility exists 80 to 100 feet above the 100-year flood stage for the Ohio River. This guarantees that operations can continue safely during floods, which contribute to 20% of total economic losses since the turn of the century.

For cold weather, the plant's electric heat tracing system is designed for minimum ambient air temperatures of -25°C (-13°F).

The plant is also strategically placed outside of typical hurricane territory, which is concentrated heavily along the Gulf Coast, helping to ensure a more reliable supply for converters.

Measuring Customer Happiness, One Experience at a Time

Back inside the plant, our customer teams are collecting and measuring data to improve the (Real)ationships we’re building with converters.

This process of continuous listening is essential to our approach, and it all began during the planning phases for the plant when our experts conducted more than 1,000 hours of interviews with converters about their challenges and needs.

As we were preparing to build our Monaca, Pennsylvania polyethylene plant, Shell Polymers conducted over 1,000 hours of interviews with converters.

Those discussions informed how we designed and outfitted the facility with equipment, systems, and expert personnel. With the plant now up and running, customer experience metrics are informing how we further adapt our business to suit their needs.

These “moments that matter,” as we call them, run the gamut of the customer experience, including onboarding, initial orders, shipment receipts, running collaborative resin trials, and more.

Our team is measuring each of those impactful moments carefully through customer experience surveys and feedback.