For 24 years now, Bilfinger has been working with TOTAL's Mitteldeutschland refinery in Leuna, Germany, assisting with various modernization and expansion measures. Recently, the TOTAL refinery awarded Bilfinger two further major contracts worth roughly 30 million euros: The first involves exchanging the reactor systems; the second, performing the turnaround for the plant's partial oxidation (POX) methanol facility. More than 800 Bilfinger specialists will be involved in these two projects.
The first of these projects, replacing the six reactor systems, will have to be carried out in the midst of ongoing production operations and, if at all possible, without any downtime. This will be the most extensive refurbishment work ever done at the Leuna plant. The project is expected to result in a 20-percent increase in the volume of methanol produced.
In order to keep downtime as short as possible, Bilfinger has developed its own in-house concept for executing turnarounds. The results speak for themselves: Every year, Bilfinger performs around 30 comprehensive turnarounds of industrial plants across Europe. The field service responsible for turnarounds has expended 4.5 million man-hours of work in recent years -- without a single accident entailing lost workdays.
A project of this magnitude requires careful advance preparation; accordingly, planning began as early as the start of 2019. With these two projects, Bilfinger will support the TOTAL refinery in further boosting its competitiveness. The complete replacement of the reactors will form part of the "Leuna 2020+" catalogue of measures intended to make the refinery viable for the future by ramping up its production of methanol while demand for heavy fuel products declines.
For more information, visit www.bilfinger.com or call (281) 604-0309.