The closest I’ve ever come to understanding the phrase “time is money” was the first time I ever experienced a plant turnaround. There is no other experience that compares to this tightly controlled but hectic window of time. It’s easy to understand the impact of the turnaround process; you can calculate negative revenue due to downtime in hours and minutes, and calculating lost revenue per day is painful. Therefore, it’s critical to account for every second during the process.
However, time is not the only critical factor when planning a turnaround and, as an expert contractor, it’s not even our most critical factor — regulatory compliance, exposure and safety are even more important. Even with months or years planning your turnaround it’s easy to encounter a snag you didn’t plan on that will put your plant out of compliance with local, state or federal regulations. Perhaps the volatile organic compounds in your vapor stream are beyond what the plant is permitted for or levels of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) and mercaptans will impact neighboring residential and commercial areas. Managing these issues in-house and on the fly can cause excess standby time, more front-end costs or a notice of violation (NOV).
Picture this: Midway through a turnaround event, the plant has approximately 30,000 barrels of excess process wastewater highly contaminated with H2S, oil and grease beyond what its resources can manage. The original strategy using in-house resources was to find a place to store it or transport it off-site to a waste treatment facility. Companies undergoing turnaround are under scrutiny from regulators, and any solution using company resources costs money, time and jeopardizes compliance. The truth is some facilities just don’t have the equipment and resources to efficiently deal with the load turnaround (and upsets) puts on their systems, in which case it’s best to call in a specialty contractor who has sophisticated equipment, contacts and knowledge.
Because such contractors manage what lies beyond the plant’s standard scope, options like treating the water on-site become viable. These “next-level” options often cost much less than the original estimate and definitely lie within what the plant is permitted for. Also, the variety of “tools” in the specialty contractor’s arsenal far exceeds what the plant may be able to source or use without assistance. Potential solutions may include air flotation, filtration pods, clay media, thermal oxidizers or any number of other processes and equipment that will best fit the site, logistics and chemical waste present at the plant. Contrary to “common knowledge,” cost savings netted as a result of using specialty services can run to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Specialty contractor engineers work directly with turnaround planning teams and environmental departments to scope and provide services. This type of consultation and provision of expert operators and equipment includes having the tanks, piping, pumps, scrubbers, water treatment systems and proprietary chemicals made available to the plant, as well as sophisticated compliance monitoring and reporting done by expert operators and engineers.
From time to time, companies need a specialty contractor urgently as they realize they’ve hit a seemingly insurmountable snag. The best contractors are able to mobilize immediately to support their needs. After all, time and compliance equal money in a turnaround situation. Engineering and deploying the best solutions for the vapor control and water treatment portions of your turnaround while ensuring a plant meets local, state and federal regulations is well beyond the scope of “jack-of-all-trades” general contractors.
Downtime during turnaround is a known cost; however, cascading delays and/or regulator NOVs are costs no one can accurately predict. Ensuring plant turnaround processes will meet safety and regulatory requirements is the name of the game and requires that you work with experts who take your work as seriously as they take theirs. It bears thinking about now, as specialty contractors book two to four years in advance of planned outages.
For more information, visit http://enventcorporation.com or contact Jay Nyberg at (888) 997-9465 or jay.nyberg@envent.net.
