US turnaround managers eye new strategies after schedules disrupted from pandemic

HOUSTON (ICIS)–Many turnarounds at plants and refineries scheduled for 2020 were deferred because of the pandemic, which has put increased pressure on turnaround managers, panellists at the Reuters USA Downstream conference said on Thursday.

Randy Pound, director of performance solutions with Hargrove Engineers and Contractors and the host of the panel, said the whole nature of turnaround management changed because of the deferments.

“It can immediately affect your turnaround frequency optimisation,” he said.

Pound has years of experience in the entire life cycle of assets from his time at various companies before joining Hargrove, most recently with Olin.

With Olin, Pound oversaw 42 turnarounds a year globally at 72 different plants.

Celeste Jefferson, engineering maintenance and turnaround supervisor for Shell operations in Port Allen, Louisiana, said the deferred turnarounds have led to her being told by leadership to focus on “mission critical” issues.

She explained that turnaround planning is extensive, so any schedule changes involve a lot of moving parts.

She said Shell has a turnaround at the refinery every four to six years, and that planning begins about 24 months out.

The catalyst plant has scheduled maintenance every six months. They begin planning three months in advance, and then spend three months doing closeout.

“So that turnaround team is constantly planning,” she said.

Chad Bates, asset supervisor for BASF in Geismar, Louisiana, said his situation is a little different.

Because of outages at his sites from winter storm Uri, he has been told the company wants to keep all four units at the site running 100% through all of 2022 so they are taking a unit down for seven days this year “to replace parts that we think are going to break”.

The panel agreed that this type of predictive maintenance can be beneficial.

“I would like to be able to get more predictive in the coming years,” Bates said. “We should be learning from previous incidents and not have to do so much discovery work.”

Which brought up another issue for the panel – logistics and supply chain constraints are impacting when turnaround managers must order the parts they need.

Jefferson said she has started ordering parts now for turnarounds scheduled next year.

“So, now my warehouse inventory and budget are over, but we have to have the parts when we need them,” she said.

Bates agreed.

“Every year in January we start meeting to plan our turnaround in October,” he said. “I am starting to order those parts in January.”

He said that he locks them up in the turnaround trailer and makes them off limits.

“We will not use them if another issue comes up before the turnaround,” he said.

The Reuters Downstream USA 2021 conference continues through Friday at the NRG Center, Conference and Exhibition, in Houston, Texas.