Over the past two months, we’ve given you two big areas that have real impact on your new construction or expansion projects. This month we give you an example of a situation involving pre-engineering, tight timelines and a system not ready for pre-commissioning cleaning.
At B&W, we have faced a variety of nearly worst-case scenarios, such as when we were contracted to steam blow a large and complex triple pressure steam system containing over 250 blows, and construction completed only four weeks in advance of the target steam blow date. Our engineering analysis uncovered many significant and necessary system modifications in order to clean the system, which negatively impacted the start date of blowing by more than 60 days.
Upon completing the project, the client offered this staggering assessment of the impact caused by modifying the system: The total cost to implement the required changes tipped the scales at over $9 million dollars. This rework was more than double the cost for B&W to complete the steam blow scope of work. For roughly 2% of this cost, the entire rework and schedule loss could have been avoided. When evaluating the total impact (based on approximately $2 million per day non-operating) the damage was in excess of almost $130 million dollars.
This example reflects the incredible amount of risk assumed when you follow the traditional model of beginning pre-commissioning and commissioning activities once systems are turned over from construction. On the other hand, bringing in experts during the design and planning phase all but eliminates these risks by offering plant-wide safety planning, pre-engineering and pre-planning of the pre-commissioning cleaning requirements. B&W Energy Services has provided this service with great success on large-scale projects across the globe. In most cases, these efforts have delivered an estimated savings of 0.01 to 0.05% of the projects’ total investment value.
The value offered by this method comes to fruition when you deliver the keys back to the plant owner on time and on budget.