In the September 2021 edition of “The Chemical Engineer” magazine, Gordon discusses the current poor state of turnaround cost estimating and highlights five, simple to implement actions that can help improve the accuracy of future turnaround estimates. To read the full article click here. This article is the fourth in a planned series of six from Gordon, being published […]
~ Writing a Basis of Estimate ~ The Recommended Practices issued by AACE International are widely recognized and have been adopted in estimating and control departments across the process industries. Until recently, the focus of these practices was mainly on capital projects. However, they are now also beginning to cover Maintenance Turnarounds. A first RP on Maintenance […]
This paper is an excerpt from the author’s contribution to a panel discussion at the Marcus Evans 9th Annual Chem/Petrochem & Refinery Shutdowns and Turnarounds Conference, August 2017 For continuous manufacturing or process facilities, unplanned production disruptions are extremely costly. One way to avoid these is to make sure that all work done during planned […]
In the July 2021 online edition of “The Chemical Engineer” magazine, Gordon discusses how project teams are often blamed by turnaround managers for problems with meeting turnaround event schedules. He examines the key areas that need to be addressed when integrating a project into a turnaround event and highlights the point that these areas need to be discussed and resolved during the project […]
Participants: Doug Clarke, Al Keller, Jim Asquith, Sam Lordo, Bob Falkiner, Steve DeLude and Roberto Tomotaki To review the Q&A article in Digital Refining, please click HERE We’d like to produce less light naphtha and more liquid fuels from our hydrocracker. How do we go about it? For changes mid-run with an existing hydrocracker catalyst load, […]
Participants: Gerrit Buchheim, Mel Larson, Fred Lea, and Robert Ohmes To review the Q&A article in Digital Refining, please click HERE We didn’t expect severe corrosion issues in the carbon steel of our amine unit. What’s causing it? – Gerrit Buchheim Severe corrosion in amine units is not rare and should be expected. Depending […]
Evaluating Rework and Delays can help improve the Schedule Predictability of Construction Projects while reducing Costs The construction industry’s challenge in meeting cost and schedule budgets is greatly affected by rework. A regional initiative in the early 2000s was tasked with developing a simple tool to capture and analyze field rework at major industrial construction […]
The steam methane reformer (SMR) is the most complex operation and equipment design in an ammonia, hydrogen, or methanol plant. It is also the most expensive single item of capital expenditure and the dominant energy and variable cost consumer in the plant. Most reformer operations have a ‘set & forget’ culture when it comes to […]
Avoid This Surprise When Determining How Long Your Next Process Outage Will Take Continuous processing or manufacturing facilities will occasionally require planned outages to primarily address reliability or maintenance issues. Due to the high cost of these outages (opportunity and real), careful planning and scheduling practices are used to come up with detailed execution plans […]
In Part 1 we observed that some of the best results come from organizations with poor maintenance work processes and some organizations with a great work process have poor results. It was also noted that the maintenance work process itself only accounts for 10% to 20% of the total maintenance value. In Part 2 we […]
