In today's petrochemical market, producers and EPCs face mounting pressure to control and decrease costs. With the recent influx of new construction and expansion projects, a potential manpower shortage will greatly impact project timelines and expenses. Project managers tend to cope with this pressure by designing and constructing new projects as quickly as possible and at the lowest installed rate. Without proper foresight, however, these cost-cutting decisions may in fact yield the opposite results. Your project can face enormous risk when engineers fail to consider pre-commissioning and commissioning of these systems from the very beginning. Why is this strategy so risky, and how could it potentially impact your project?
Running uncalculated risks
The longstanding industry model indicates that pre-commissioning and commissioning activities begin once systems are turned over from construction. While EPCs do their best to look ahead toward the pre-commissioning phase, mounting pressure to complete the construction activities as soon as possible can overtake the desire to plan to the fullest extent. This pressure gets magnified when faced with aforementioned potential resource and staffing shortages. By the time the pre-commissioning cleaning phase comes around, the design of the various piping systems is fixed, and any modifications to support pre-commissioning work can only come in the form of expedited rework. This creates a huge impact to cost and schedule.
Potential scenarios include valves and other components having to be removed and reinstalled; entry and exit points having to be identified and implemented; and particular spool pieces, replacement gaskets, and/or valve kits requiring installation. Oftentimes multiple sections share piping systems, necessitating a complicated and detailed cleaning process outline and approach. When all these modifications happen after the fact, the associated costs become significant to the overall project budget.
Reconsidering value
There is, however, a different approach that can help avoid these problems: bringing in experts who can provide the pre-planning and pre-engineering work to identify any necessary system modifications right from the start. Evaluating system designs during the initial planning phase will ensure your final system design will support the pre-commissioning cleaning needs without rework, additional costs and impacting the schedule.
Here's an example case
I have faced a variety of these nearly worst-case scenarios, such as when I was contracted to steam-blow a large and complex triple-pressure steam system containing over 250 blows, and construction completed only four weeks in advance of the target steam-blow date. Engineering analysis uncovered many significant and necessary system modifications in order to clean the system, which negatively impacted the start date of blowing by more than 60 days.
Upon completing the project, the client offered this staggering assessment of the impact caused by modifying the system: The total cost to implement the required changes tipped the scales at over $9 million . This rework was more than double the cost to complete the steam-blow scope of work. For roughly 2 percent of this cost, the entire rework and schedule loss could have been avoided. When evaluating the total impact (based on approximately $2 million per day non-operating), the damage was in excess of almost $130 million dollars.
This example reflects the incredible amount of risk assumed when you follow the traditional model. On the other hand, bringing in experts during the design and planning phase all but eliminates these risks by offering plant-wide safety planning, pre-engineering and pre-planning of the pre-commissioning cleaning requirements. This service has been provided with great success on largescale projects across the globe. In most cases, these efforts have delivered an estimated savings of 0.01-0.05 percent of the projects' total investment value.
The value offered by this method comes to fruition when you deliver the keys back to the plant owner on time and on budget.
For more information, visit www. bwenergyservices.com or call (281) 534-9300.
