Darin Grandfield earned his master’s degree in metallurgical engineering at California Polytechnic State University in 2009. Originally, he planned to use his education to work on semiconductors in a laboratory, but an internship at ConocoPhillips convinced him that working in a refinery was vastly more interesting. He is now operations manager at Phillips 66’s Humber Refinery in the United Kingdom.
What drew you to the energy industry?
Although much of my family is from the mid-continent, I don’t have any family history in energy and am a first-generation refiner. I had a very lucky encounter with a ConocoPhillips recruiter that resulted in an internship opportunity at the San Francisco Refinery, and the rest is history. I will never forget the sense of realization that refining was the place for me as I got to tour the San Francisco Coking Unit for the first time.
I don’t think there’s another industry out there where a new engineer can get the opportunities we so quickly get at Phillips 66. The sheer scale of investment and resources available to those with ingenuity and creative thinking for solving complex problems continues to impress me daily.
I also greatly appreciate the unique personalities in a refinery and truly believe that the energy industry creates an incredible opportunity for those with significant diversity in educational and family backgrounds. Regardless of their history, anyone with a strong work ethic, respect for others and a problem-solving mind can find success in a refinery, and I think that is quite rare outside of our industry.
What does your day-to-day job look like?
I spend my days supporting the talented operators who safely operate our refinery each day. This means I divide time:
- With my operations team reviewing the technicalities and performance indicators of plant operation to ensure we’re doing everything in our power to best capture the market by safely making the products that our customers need when they need them.
- Ensuring our peers in the refinery have the resources and information they need to be successful – i.e. giving clear guidance on repair priorities for refinery equipment.
- Steering, coaching and mentoring across the department to focus our leaders on the right things to enable their front line to succeed.
- Reviewing, developing, and communicating our longer-range goals, strategies and tactics to help position the refinery for the future.
This year’s theme for Engineers Week is Design Your Future. Can you tell us about your career path and how you’ve been able to design your career?
One key to designing my career was trusting those ahead of me when I was asked to do a role outside of my normal scope or skills, especially when it was not a promotional role. On more than one occasion, I have personally gone “backwards to go forward.” I had great leaders who consciously moved me to roles I wasn’t an obvious fit for to develop me in ways that I didn’t know I needed. It was ultimately embracing these moves that made the biggest difference in my career trajectory. The best example of this was when I moved from my corrosion engineering role to process engineering, a transformational move I found to be both intimidating and the steepest learning curve I’ve had in my career.
How is Phillips 66 designing the future of the energy industry?
I am lucky enough to be a part of the Humber Refinery, where we are leading the company in trialing renewable feedstocks, such as used cooking oil and tire pyrolysis oils. Our innovative approach to processing renewables is exciting and a first step toward the future of the energy industry. Humber Refinery is also unique in that we’re a leading producer of the products that ultimately make electric vehicle batteries. All of these leading-edge approaches to refining require prompt and innovative engineering solutions to problems we had no idea we’d encounter when we started. It’s both a fun and challenging space to be in with new experiences all the time.
What principles of engineering can everyone use to solve problems and increase efficiency, no matter what their role is?
I am a big fan of the continuous improvement mindset. If engineers embrace and apply the lean concepts of continuous improvement to their sphere of influence in our manufacturing process, they will quickly realize that there is almost always opportunity to increase efficiency, margin or performance in any aspect of our business. I have yet to find an area of refining that we could not improve if we put a collaborative team focus on it. The trick is to implement improvements sustainably so as not to lose focus on wherever we worked last!
My other bit of advice is to keep it simple. There are constant reminders in our field of overly complex engineered solutions that are unreliable because they are more complex than they need to be. This is harder than it sounds and the best guidance I can give is to not work in isolation and to leverage the knowledge of your peers every day to solicit feedback and act on it. They will tell you if you’ve got it wrong, and we all need to listen.
