Title : Best practices to overcome challenges of a brownfield project
Abstract:
Brownfield projects execution, especially in hydrocarbon facilities, are always faced with many challenges like limitations in existing plant capacity, space layout constrains, underground obstruction or process parameters. In addition, construction in live plants comes with its own complications. Among others, presence of hydrocarbon, high pressure pipelines, live power lines and existing operating equipment are examples of these complications. This adds up to the usual projects' challenges in general in terms of engineering, procurement, delivery of material and execution contractor performance.
In a "Replacement of a Gas Compression Train" project, the objective was to replace an old existing gas compression train driven by a gas turbine with an equivalent gas compression train driven by a steam turbine utilizing some of the existing equipment. The project has gone thru a lot of the brownfield challenges starting from the design till putting the new train in service. The project team successfully implemented new design proposals and many execution practices to overcome all these challenges. In this presentation, we will shed some light on some of these practices that were followed in the design, procurement, and construction.
Among other practices, the following practices were followed:
- In procurement, novation of the main equipment Purchase Order from the design contractor to the LSTK contractor helped optimizing the delivery to the site.
- In design, using a back-to-back compression train arrangement addressed the space constrains and has less Capex and Opex.
- In construction, using a gantry crane system assured the safety at site and expedited the main skid erection.
