Whether it’s impacting turnaround schedules, decreasing or eliminating budgets, or necessitating scope modifications, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the refining industry to demonstrate its agility for nearly all of 2020.
Fortunately, most companies have stepped up to this unprecedented challenge with agility and resourcefulness and found ways to operate in this unfamiliar environment.
Speaking as a member of a roundtable discussing reliability and maintenance at the 2020 AFPM Summit, Andrew Jakubowski, turnaround manager for Flint Hills Resources (FHR), said his company’s No. 1 priority is the health and safety of its employees the contractors they bring on-site.
“It is important for all of us to ensure that nothing happens with our facilities, so if that means it could take longer to do certain work activities, that is something that we need to consider and be real about,” Jakubowski said.
FHR had a small planned event earlier this year that had to be delayed in order for workers to be better prepared for it, Jakubowski noted.
“We are utilizing that to be a good knowledge-building capability, as we get ready for a larger event to see how we can handle those mitigations,” he said.
“Some projects may be deferred; some projects are proceeding as planned,” said Bill Parente, senior project director for Fluor Corp.
Parente added that because Fluor conducts a lot of wireless work in the refinery spaces, they’ve been working with all of their customers on coronavirus (CV) protocols.
“We have our own CV protocol, but what we are seeing, obviously, is a lot of remote work,” Parente said. “There are a whole lot platforms of video capabilities out there, and technology is so far advanced that we are not seeing a big impact in terms of progressing projects. Productivity is good, and we’re able to do reviews of models and bring information up. When we go to a site to do lockdown, obviously all the CV protocols are in place.”
“So is it different? It is a little different,” Parente concluded. “But the projects are proceeding, and we are dealing with it on a day-to-day basis.”
