Downstream operators are continuously being asked to deliver more with the assets they already have. Yet with volatile markets, evolving crude slates, logistical constraints, and limited capital budgets, most downstream businesses still carry significant untapped margin potential –value obscured by organizational silos, inherited operating assumptions, and KPIs that no longer reflect today’s environment.
Stillwater’s UNLOCK is designed to surface this hidden value. By bringing refining, commercial, logistics, planning, and operations together in a structured but low disruption process, UNLOCK identifies improvements that can be implemented within 6–24 months and typically require little or no capital.
Why Is There Hidden Value?
Refining margins are shaped by interdependent decisions: crude selection, unit operating conditions, logistics flows, blending strategies, and product placement. Over time, these decisions congeal into institutional habits – even as markets, asset configurations, and constraints shift. When each function optimizes within its own function/unit, profitable alternatives remain invisible or are dismissed as infeasible simply because no one has stepped back to challenge the original assumptions.
UNLOCK addresses this challenge by restoring crossfunctional visibility and subjecting longstanding paradigms to current technical and commercial scrutiny.
What UNLOCK Is… and Is Not
UNLOCK is not a prescriptive checklist, optimization model, or off-the-shelf playbook implemented by a busload of inexperienced, non-industry, MBAs. It is a facilitated process that combines structure, analytics, and Stillwater’s deep industry experience with your organization’s operational knowledge. Your teams generate and prioritize the improvement opportunities themselves; Stillwater guides the discussion, challenges assumptions, and ensures that potential value is accurately framed and sized.
The objective is clear: identify lowcapex, highreturn opportunities, while strengthening the organization’s commercial mindset for ongoing performance improvement.
Why Does UNLOCK Work?
UNLOCK works because it addresses the underlying organizational dynamics that keep value locked away.
First, UNLOCK creates disciplined crossfunctional visibility supported by experienced facilitation. Refining, planning, commercial, supply, logistics, and operations rarely evaluate decisions together. UNLOCK brings them into one forum with a shared fact base – guided by Stillwater associates who are former industry executives that led real operating and commercial organizations and have lived that accountability. Their experience helps teams ask the right questions, challenge assumptions, and properly frame and scope ideas.
Second, UNLOCK challenges outdated paradigms. Many constraints persist simply because they were once true. With fresh technical and market insight, and facilitation from people who understand how organizations and refineries actually run, we’ll help your teams distinguish real limits from old habits.
Third, UNLOCK drives alignment and accountability. Ideas are quickly prioritized, assigned to owners, built into the business plan, and tracked quarterly with direct lineofsight to the executive team. This ensures momentum continues after the workshop.
Finally, Stillwater supports execution. Through followup analytics, dashboards, reviews, and refresh workshops, the process reinforces delivery and builds internal capability.
In short, UNLOCK works because it combines structured collaboration, experienced facilitation, and disciplined accountability – turning hidden opportunities into real results.
What Opportunities Typically Emerge
Across sites, UNLOCK consistently reveals margin-improving, highvalue initiatives in areas such as:
- Optimization of operating conditions (temperatures, pressures, cut points)
- Better utilization of existing assets across process units and logistics
- Marketaligned product strategies and improved blending decisions
- Crude selection and logistics enhancements that lower cost or improve flexibility
- KPI realignment toward economic performance instead of volumetric targets
- Lowcapex debottlenecking across the downstream value chain
These opportunities emerge because UNLOCK removes the organizational boundaries that prevent teams from seeing how their decisions interact. UNLOCK participants develop commercial mindsets and are energized as they see the impact as their ideas are implemented!
The Bottom Line
Most downstream companies have far more value available within their existing assets and capabilities than they realize. UNLOCK reveals this value, aligns the organization around it, and embeds a governance model that ensures results are delivered. For refiners seeking meaningful EBITDA uplift without major capital expenditure, UNLOCK is one of the highestreturn options available today.
If you’d like to explore bringing UNLOCK to your site, Stillwater is ready to help.