Unlocking Hidden Profits: Twice the Insight. No Extra Work. Add the Aromatics Study to Your Fuels Study Subscription Today.

For over 40 years, Solomon’s Worldwide Fuels Refinery Performance Analysis (Fuels Study) has been the gold standard for helping refiners understand how they stack up against their industry peers. More importantly, the Fuel Study delivers practical insights that can help refiners close their performance gaps. If your facility sells high-value aromatics such as benzene, toluene, or xylenes into downstream markets, you may be leaving significant profit on the table by participating only in the Fuels Study.

The Worldwide Aromatics Plant Performance Analysis (Aromatics Study), first introduced in 2015, is built to go deeper than the Fuels Study — providing clients not only with a global perspective but with a more granular analysis of their aromatics manufacturing performance.

The best part? Adding the Aromatics Study to your Fuels Study participation requires zero additional data collection on your part. Simply indicate that you’d like to participate in both studies and Solomon handles the rest. One data collection effort. Two comprehensive analyses. It’s time to maximize the return on your investment.

The Fuels Study gives you a powerful view of your overall refinery performance. The Aromatics Study transforms that view into a precise tool to maximize your aromatics’ net cash margin — identifying exactly where money is being lost and what it takes to get it back. Together, these two studies create a complete picture of your facility that neither can deliver alone.

Take xylene isomerization, for example. Rather than comparing your unit against all units in a broad region, the Aromatics Study lets you benchmark your units against assets with similar age, size, and technology profiles — giving you more accurate comparisons that drive real, targeted cost-saving opportunities.

The Fuels Study is designed to optimize costs across your entire fuels site. The Aromatics Study zeros in on the naphthato-aromatics value chain — enabling your aromatics business to make more informed, data-driven decisions in this highly competitive global market.

Every Aromatics Study presentation includes an Efficiency Gaps to High-Performance Plants (HPP) analysis, showing you precisely where your facility falls short of industry-leading performance and what it would mean to your bottom line to close that gap. Knowing where you stand is the first step to getting ahead.

Energy costs are one of the largest controllable expenses in aromatics operations. The Aromatics Study doesn’t just flag energy inefficiency — it specifies problem areas for review to reduce energy consumption on site and zeros in on the specific units where the greatest impacts are possible. With a clear Energy Focus Analysis, your team can take bold, targeted actions to maximize profitability while saving time and resources.

Small adjustments in your aromatics facility’s feed can have large effects on your facility’s energy, maintenance, and yield performance. The Aromatics Study provides a detailed review of your facility’s feed mix so you can make informed adjustments that improve your overall downstream operation.

For example, the Aromatics Study provides an analysis of reformer feed distillation points. As the data consistently shows, light feed increases solvent extraction intensity and reduces reformer yield — a costly dynamic that can be corrected once identified.

The Aromatics Study provides a comprehensive Aromatics Product Slate Review and Gross Margin Analysis — tools that allow you to see what the best-performing facilities in the industry are doing differently with their yield slates and co-product destinations.

By aligning your product mix with industry-leading best practices, you can directly increase your gross margin capability — turning benchmarking insight into bottom-line impact.