ENERGY PROCESSING FACILITY CASE STUDY

Trinity Powers a Turnaround at a Gas Processing Plant

Scheduled turnarounds are crucial for the safety and maintenance of equipment at facilities across a variety of industries. They are also important for making any upgrades or changes that a facility requires to stay efficient and competitive. Our client, an Alberta-based turnaround and project management company that offers full-service turnaround planning, logistics and execution, recently oversaw a gas plant turnaround that took advantage of a scheduled turnaround to go from sour to sweet — sweet gas, that is.

With 20 years in the industry, the company that owns the property is among the “largest independent mid-stream energy companies in Canada”. They specialize in managing complex energy processing facilities, and the facility undergoing the turnaround is one of their biggest. To ensure the large-scale turnaround was successful, the company brought our client on board, who in turn came to us to provide the temporary power for the project.

This scheduled maintenance turnaround was slated to include equipment maintenance and a DCS (distributed control system) upgrade.

With so much going on, an effective temporary power solution was key in ensuring a timely completion.

Despite being shut down, the facility needed power, and lots of it. “For this turnaround, we have an extra 260 people on site on a daily basis,” our client estimates. “We have 12 large construction trailers that are on site, for the crews, for lunch rooms, and for washroom facilities.” On top of the trailers, power was needed for lighting, construction equipment and tools, as well as two water pumps – one for fire water and one for potable water.

Our client’s turnaround coordinator had worked with Trinity before, and knew we were up to the task. Having worked with other temporary power vendors, this electrician was pleasantly surprised with the Trinity team.

“In a word, I would have to say it was just seamless,” he recalls. “The guys came out for the original site visit and from that point on, Trinity was able to help us out with everything we needed. Just supplying our utility power for the trailers and offices, to air conditioning units — we needed an air conditioner for the control room — to a step-up transformer that we needed to keep a couple of critical motors running.”

On top of the transformer and air conditioner, Trinity also provided eight generators ranging from 20kW to 230kW and over 20 main and sub distribution panels along with all the interconnecting cables (about four kilometers’ worth), all in an easy to use plug-n-play configuration.

On top of the equipment, Trinity also performed site visits to determine the best system design, and provided their clients team with single line drawings to help facilitate the install. “We had some other electrical contractors connecting all the equipment who were not really part of the whole design scope. They were able to look at the drawings during installation, and see exactly how to hook everything up. The documentation just made it very, very easy.”

Would our client work with Trinity again? Absolutely. “Trinity is the only vendor I can say that I’ve dealt with that really is just a one stop shop,” he says. “You just tell them what your requirements are, and they design a solution. And all the power generation and distribution equipment is supplied.”

Thanks to good teamwork and Trinity’s well-designed solution, the electrical component of the turnaround was completed on schedule, allowing the other facets of the project to move ahead when they needed to.

On time and on budget, without a hitch