In today’s market, clients are looking to control cost more so than ever. A focus on constructing new projects at the lowest installed cost is driving decisions early in the design phase, which may in fact yield the opposite results. Systems are designed for operation, and in many cases pre-commissioning and commissioning of these systems are not considered. So where does the risk come into play?
“What can you do to help minimize this risk?”
The industry standard has long been to start pre-commissioning and commissioning activities once systems have been turned over from construction. At this point, the design of the system is fixed and any modifications to support pre-commissioning work will be in the form of expedited rework with huge impacts to cost and schedule.
This scenario is all too common in the industry, and B&W Energy Services is looking to change that trend. For a mere fraction of the cost to implement these common system modifications, B&W Energy Services can perform a thorough evaluation of system designs based on our vast experience performing pre-commissioning cleaning. Doing so will ensure your final system design will support the pre-commissioning cleaning needs without rework, without additional costs, and without impacting the schedule.
“What can go wrong and what possible impact could it have on your next project”?
B&W was faced with this exact challenge on a very large refinery expansion not far from Houston, Texas. We were contracted to steam blow a very large and complex triple pressure steam system containing over 250 blows. The engineering was completed only four weeks in advance of the target steam blow date. The results of our engineering uncovered many significant system modifications that were required to successfully execute the blows. The time required to complete these modifications negatively impacted the start date of blowing by over 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 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.
“What can go wrong and what can go right”
This example reflects the potential risks that can go wrong and ultimately create a non-recoverable loss to your projects success. B&W Energy Services has all but eliminated 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.