At B&W Energy Services, we work on many of the world’s largest and most complex projects for EPC firms and Owners who seek results-driven value from their pre-commissioning and commissioning cleaning partner. Our customers see the benefit of bringing a world-class engineering team into their projects as early as possible. Why? When you collaborate with our engineers in the early stages of a project, your end result is plants built with pre-commissioning cleaning in mind. This means significantly minimized delays and cost overruns by avoiding unnecessary changes during construction to support system cleaning.
Our team of experts highly recommends proactivity in bringing in B&W Energy Services as early in the process as possible, so that each facet of design and execution is properly set up for cleaning. Let’s face it: if an EPC or Owner is inevitably going to pay for engineering at some point, it’s more effective early-on and doesn’t put the project behind the 8-ball later.
RESULTS-DRIVEN PLANNING
In each oil, gas, petrochemical and power new construction and expansion project B&W Energy Services takes on, we see plants designed and engineered to amazing levels of precision and complexity. While plants are designed for optimal efficiency and production levels, they are also optimized for the lowest possible installed cost. For many projects in the design phase, consideration for how the systems will be cleaned during commissioning is an afterthought.
Often times when our team is brought in to execute pre-commissioning services after construction has started, we find closed systems that offer little to no access for effective cleaning. No matter the service—steam blows, air blows, chemical cleaning, AquaLazing, pulse flushes or oil flushes—system access points are crucial to support effective cleaning and ensuring reliable plant start up. Other considerations such as having proper system isolations, and adequate space for temporary equipment near the systems being cleaned, are essential for the B&W team to complete their scope of work safely and effectively.
B&W Energy Services is unrivaled in effectively cleaning piping systems for any size or type of project. Our experts bring the latest technology, proven methods and proprietary equipment to clean each system to the highest standards. But, we can’t clean what we can’t reach. No one can.
B&W Energy Services addresses these issues in several ways. Early in the project design phase, our engineers work with your project engineers to ensure systems are designed to allow for effective cleaning, while still keeping within project guidelines and cost considerations. It takes an experienced set of eyes who have executed hundreds of successful pre-commissioning projects to do this. Ensuring the access points are properly sized is equally as important, since restrictions to flow can negatively impact the outcome of your cleaning.
Our engineering team can even take it a step further by designing and integrating temporary piping systems and flushing equipment directly into the plant 3-D models using the latest software—this sets us apart from the competition.
In addition to focusing on plant system design, it’s important to determine the cleaning methods to be used. Defining a cleaning program for every system early in the project can greatly enhance project schedule predictability, and also allows all interested parties to have the necessary buy-in early. Our team can help with that too. We can also offer new alternatives to traditional cleaning methods, which can further reduce project schedule and costs overruns.
In our industry, there has been a shift towards increased focus on scheduling and planning in the design phase of plant construction. This shift is key. We work to ensure that our customers are able to bring in the savings of time and money that engineering with B&W offers.
SO, WHAT HAPPENS?
By doing the pre-planning, we can avoid the expensive modifications to newly constructed piping systems. We’ve seen projects where a lack of pre-engineering for necessary cleaning added weeks of delay to the schedule and millions of dollars from the bottom line. We’ve even encountered a system design that made it impossible to clean the piping at all. Imagine how much money and time was required to re-design the system. An EPC never wants to have to explain this problem to a plant owner.
A PREVENTATIVE SOLUTION
“It’s never too late to start early.”
This particular expression rings especially true in regard to pre-engineering your new plant construction or expansion project for the cleaning phase.
Maybe your project is already under construction. If that’s the case, we can still help. It’s never too late to identify opportunities to more effectively clean your systems. Next time, after you’ve worked with B&W Energy Services on your current project, allow us to partner with you earlier in the process to deliver even better results.