Customer relationship / Centrica Energy Storage
Centrica Energy Storage.
Owned four major simulator projects and the long-term customer relationship, supporting Easington and Rough through changing plant configurations.
Plant location / Satellite view
Open in Google Maps ↗Easington Gas Plant
Easington, East Yorkshire. The onshore processing setting for the Centrica Storage simulator and its later Tolmount extension.
Loads Vimeo only when you press play. Watch on Vimeo ↗
Public Centrica Energy Storage context film, showing the wider operating environment for this work. The film is background material rather than footage of the simulator I delivered.
Aerial reference photograph of gas-processing infrastructure at the Easington terminal complex on the East Yorkshire coast. · Site context: Equinor ↗
One customer relationship, four major projects
The work progressed from methanol recovery to a full-site simulator, major Tolmount and Rough injection modifications, and a later As-Built update. Smaller upgrades and annual maintenance contracts supported the relationship between major projects.
I remained the account owner through October 2026, responsible for customer engagement and selling and raising follow-on work.
Easington, Rough and the operating context
Centrica Energy Storage operates Rough, the UK’s largest gas storage facility, and the Easington onshore gas-processing terminal. The simulator needed to represent the plant as a connected operating system, extending beyond the earlier individual process-unit model.
The operating context included both injection and production modes. Injection puts gas into storage for later withdrawal; production brings gas back through processing for delivery to the National Transmission System (NTS). Storage allows gas to be held for sale and supply at a later time as demand and market conditions change.
Those modes form the engineering setting for the training system: the process model and the control-room environment need to behave consistently as operators work through the plant’s operating sequences.
The simulator followed substantial changes in the real plant: storage operations, closure and cushion-gas recovery, and the later return to storage. Closure-related changes removed injection functionality and represented reconfigured compression for recovering low-pressure cushion gas. The later simulator work restored representations of injection and compression.
Intended design and as-built alignment
The 2020 simulator was an accepted training representation of a developing intended design. Later maintenance and the 2025 As-Built project brought the simulator into alignment with the actual plant configuration.
I’ve included the gallery and film for operating context, with illustrative DeltaV images alongside them. I don’t have screenshots of the delivered simulator here.
Engineering depth and sustained customer ownership
That work became the foundation for a much broader responsibility: ownership of the full-site Easington Operator Training Simulator (OTS). It is a project through which my role developed from hands-on Chemical Engineering into customer engagement, multidisciplinary delivery and long-term account ownership.
Across the methanol-recovery model, full-site OTS and Tolmount extension, my contribution combined process modelling with project and account leadership. I moved between detailed engineering work, proposal and scope definition, collaboration with developers, acceptance testing, installation, training and support.
This remains an important example of the industrial foundations behind my later visual and immersive work: a training system built around the behaviour of a real process and the needs of the people operating it.
Customer projects
Projects in this relationship
Client projectSite context · Equinor, reference photograph supplied by LukeOil and gas / Operator training
Easington As-Built Update
Helped bring the simulator into line with the actual plant through extensive operating-procedure, shutdown and control-system testing, followed by joint delivery and acceptance.
Client projectSite context · Equinor, reference photograph supplied by LukeOil and gas / Operator training
Easington Full-Site Operator Training Simulator
Led delivery of the full-site operator training simulator, combining hands-on process engineering with DeltaV emulation, customer engagement and project ownership.
Client projectIllustrative interface · DeltaV reference image supplied by LukeOil and gas / Operator training
Methanol Recovery Simulator and Associated Updates
Implemented and delivered a methanol–water distillation simulator, from C emulation and thermodynamic code through to procedure-based testing and shift-team delivery.
Client projectSystem context · ITI Group, public reference diagramOil and gas / Operator training
Tolmount Extension and Rough Injection Project
Led the commercial and acceptance work for major Easington simulator changes, implementing hot-flash and distillation modifications for Tolmount and restored Rough injection.
Equipment & operating context
A closer look.
The wider Easington terminal setting. This Equinor photograph provides site context rather than identifying the exact boundaries of the Centrica simulator model.
Equinor, reference photograph supplied by Luke ↗
Rough offshore infrastructure provides context for the storage and production operations connected to Easington.
Centrica, via Offshore Engineer ↗
Tolmount’s offshore-to-onshore connection. The simulator extension was developed in approximately March–November 2020 ahead of the field coming into operation.
ITI Group, public reference diagram ↗
An illustrative example of the DeltaV operator-interface style. These are reference screens, not the actual Easington plant or the delivered simulator.
DeltaV reference image supplied by LukeA generic DeltaV distillation display illustrates the control-room presentation that an emulated DCS needs to reproduce. It is not an Easington process screen.
DeltaV reference image supplied by LukeFurther context
Technical references and related project information.