45 intense days: What Turnaround takes at the Co-op Refinery
Larissa Kurz - POSTMEDIA
The distinct hum of a moving crane dominates the air, as a blue-jumpsuited worker tightens his gloves around a tether line leading to the enormous cylindrical drum hovering just a few feet higher than his hard hat.
© Provided by Leader Post
Co-op Refinery Complex crews work with a crane operator to remove an old reflux drum and make way for a new one, during the site's biggest maintenance event of the year.
A shiny new drum waits off to the side, ready to take its place, as the crane operator manoeuvres the rusty old one, inch by inch, onto a stack of pallets prepped for transport.
On the other side of the Co-op Refinery Complex, the looming reactor in a sister section operates in almost unbelievably calm and quiet.
It’s almost hard to marry the two images, but it’s really a before and after reel for a film about the most important maintenance undertaking of the year at the province’s oil refinery.
Turnaround — a word capitalized in the refinery’s press releases as perhaps a nod to its importance — is really spring cleaning on a monstrous scale. Involving a $100-million investment and around 750,000 labour hours, this is when the bulk of repairs and upgrades occur to hundreds of pieces of equipment, from the smallest pipes to the most towering stacks.
It’s an event that likely goes unnoticed by the majority of the city, but one that certainly would be noticed if anything were to go wrong at the sprawling industrial complex that borders Regina’s northwest.
It’s a high stakes operation, but one that unfolds in pristinely organized chaos.
A third of the refinery is shut down completely to facilitate the work, and a legion of contract workers come to the city for a relatively short but intense period from early April to mid-June.
Wade Hillmer, superintendent of Turnaround and maintenance co-ordination, lives and breathes this project each year. He’s worked at the CRC for nearing 28 years, and he knows all the intricate puzzle pieces that fit together during the 22-month planning process leading up to spring.
Turnaround, as a project, is planned down to the minutia, because, as he says, “in a 45-day event, time is money.”
Hillmer took the Leader-Post on an exclusive tour of Turnaround operations, for a closer look at the process.
© KAYLE NEISA
A shiny new drum waits off to the side, ready to take its place, as the crane operator manoeuvres the rusty old one, inch by inch, onto a stack of pallets prepped for transport.
On the other side of the Co-op Refinery Complex, the looming reactor in a sister section operates in almost unbelievably calm and quiet.
It’s almost hard to marry the two images, but it’s really a before and after reel for a film about the most important maintenance undertaking of the year at the province’s oil refinery.
Turnaround — a word capitalized in the refinery’s press releases as perhaps a nod to its importance — is really spring cleaning on a monstrous scale. Involving a $100-million investment and around 750,000 labour hours, this is when the bulk of repairs and upgrades occur to hundreds of pieces of equipment, from the smallest pipes to the most towering stacks.
It’s an event that likely goes unnoticed by the majority of the city, but one that certainly would be noticed if anything were to go wrong at the sprawling industrial complex that borders Regina’s northwest.
It’s a high stakes operation, but one that unfolds in pristinely organized chaos.
A third of the refinery is shut down completely to facilitate the work, and a legion of contract workers come to the city for a relatively short but intense period from early April to mid-June.
Wade Hillmer, superintendent of Turnaround and maintenance co-ordination, lives and breathes this project each year. He’s worked at the CRC for nearing 28 years, and he knows all the intricate puzzle pieces that fit together during the 22-month planning process leading up to spring.
Turnaround, as a project, is planned down to the minutia, because, as he says, “in a 45-day event, time is money.”
Hillmer took the Leader-Post on an exclusive tour of Turnaround operations, for a closer look at the process.
© KAYLE NEISA
group of employees work next to a fractionator that stands tall, as crews on the ground bustle around to keep Turnaround tasks operating safely and efficiently.
How do they do it?
The complex has six sections, on a maintenance rotation of about four years.
One of the largest refineries in Canada, the CRC distributes around 17 million litres of petroleum products daily, including fuel, diesel and oil byproducts. So to shut down a portion of the complex in early spring — a time when farmers are just beginning seeding and folks are doing more travelling — requires forward thinking, to keep up with retail demand.
The refinery is strategically designed for redundancy — meaning when one section is offline, a corresponding partner section remains operational. But another part of the solution is to stockpile inventory ahead of Turnaround, both at CRC and at partner facilities in western Canada.
Turnaround focuses on two sections each year — numbers two and three currently, four and five in 2023.
Hillmer simplified the process down to a very catchy slogan: “open, clean, inspect and close.”
There are a few more steps, of course, but the primary focus of Turnaround is to complete big maintenance tasks to keep the refinery operating at peak safety. This means taking apart assets for repairs, replacements, integrity inspections, cleaning and upgrades to meet safety codes or new environmental benchmarks.
© KAYLE NEIS
Crews working on Turnaround often have access to some parts of the refinery’s assets that are normally closed up and inaccessible during regular operations.
Approximately the first 10 days are dedicated to deconstruction, where prep teams open equipment to do initial checks and cleaning, before contract workers step in.
On any given day during regular operations, there are around 600 employees on site. During Turnaround, that number spikes as high as 2,000 at the peak of activity, with as many as 1,450 temporary contract workers aiding CRC employees.
Many are local tradespeople from Saskatchewan, Alberta and Manitoba, but some specialists travel from as far as the southern United States.
“It’s quite an event, to bring everyone together and create this team,” said Hillmer.
Temporary tents house this excess human power, and security crews step up managing the site, like directing traffic during shift change.
Next, the heavy-lifting — a lot of the time, literally — begins. Priority focus is on heaters, vessels and exchangers, said Hillmer, with the addition of testing the vast amount of piping that coils through each section.
Some tasks require unique methods, like stringing in remote cameras to cast an eye on small confined spaces, or using x-rays and pressure testing to check the density, integrity and other internal factors of pipes.
© KAYLE NEIS
Approximately the first 10 days are dedicated to deconstruction, where prep teams open equipment to do initial checks and cleaning, before contract workers step in.
On any given day during regular operations, there are around 600 employees on site. During Turnaround, that number spikes as high as 2,000 at the peak of activity, with as many as 1,450 temporary contract workers aiding CRC employees.
Many are local tradespeople from Saskatchewan, Alberta and Manitoba, but some specialists travel from as far as the southern United States.
“It’s quite an event, to bring everyone together and create this team,” said Hillmer.
Temporary tents house this excess human power, and security crews step up managing the site, like directing traffic during shift change.
Next, the heavy-lifting — a lot of the time, literally — begins. Priority focus is on heaters, vessels and exchangers, said Hillmer, with the addition of testing the vast amount of piping that coils through each section.
Some tasks require unique methods, like stringing in remote cameras to cast an eye on small confined spaces, or using x-rays and pressure testing to check the density, integrity and other internal factors of pipes.
© KAYLE NEIS
Workers head to great heights to refill catalyst in the hydrogen gas refomer and ARDS system during Turnaround, unloadling the bags of material by hand as it dangles from a crane.
Around 30 cranes help move and install massive pieces of equipment at staggering heights. Workers operate a high-powered, automated pressure washer, deep cleaning hundreds of pieces of equipment before reinstallation.
One of the big tasks is to purge and refill the catalyst in the hydrogen gas reformer, a substance that essentially regulates fuel quality during the refining process.
“This is the heartbeat of the event,” said Hillmer.
Crews empty out the spent material from the large cylinders, this year using a new water-jet technique to drill down and flush out, before refilling them with the help of a crane.
Every task is done with a sharp focus on preventative maintenance, said Mark Dieno, superintendent of equipment integrity and reliability engineering.
Assets that are due for an upgrade fall under the to-do list for Turnaround crews, to take advantage of having the section shut down. This means equipment gets replaced often before the end of its lifespan, because the opportunity is there.
“We have to somehow get it all to fit together, like a big puzzle,” said Dieno, of the planning.
On the tail end, another 10 days are spent doing regulatory checks, to ensure things were put back together properly. This means inspection down to every bolt, said superintendent of process safety Megan Torrie.
“We check every single joint that we opened or touched,” said Torrie. “There’s a lot of work, after the big event that is Turnaround, but process safety is about keeping the process in the pipe.”
© KAYLE NEISSections four and five of the refinery continue to run as normal, while Turnaround crews focus on sections two and three this year, to maintain production and meet retail demand for refinery products.
Why do Turnaround?
While this blitz in the spring may be the busiest time of year for maintenance, Dieno clarified that inspectors keep constant tabs on the state of refinery assets.
Regular checks for wear and tear and performance are part of the operational routine, along with checks for industry benchmarks.
“We want to make sure equipment stays in a safe working order and the risk is minimized,” said Dieno.
Hillmer and crew actually use this comprehensive data to help plan the scope of work that will take place during Turnaround, sometimes in a way that feels a little like predicting the future.
The utmost priority of Turnaround is safety, emphasized Hillmer — of the workers, of processes at the complex and, in the bigger picture, of the entire city.
The 800-acre complex houses plenty of flammable and explosive material, which could pose a potentially terrifying disaster if anything were to happen on site.
“We want everyone who comes to work to go home at the end of the day, just the same or better than when they arrived,” said Torrie.
And with the refinery bordering the edge of Regina, safety consideration also extends beyond the site’s fenced-in limits.
Keeping the complex operating safely and reliably is “paramount,” said Dieno, and the largest driving force behind Turnaround maintenance.
“We have a low tolerance for allowing anything to happen,” said Dieno. “The things we’re doing are largely to prevent things from even getting close to happening.”
lkurz@postmedia.com
© KAYLE NEIS
Around 30 cranes help move and install massive pieces of equipment at staggering heights. Workers operate a high-powered, automated pressure washer, deep cleaning hundreds of pieces of equipment before reinstallation.
One of the big tasks is to purge and refill the catalyst in the hydrogen gas reformer, a substance that essentially regulates fuel quality during the refining process.
“This is the heartbeat of the event,” said Hillmer.
Crews empty out the spent material from the large cylinders, this year using a new water-jet technique to drill down and flush out, before refilling them with the help of a crane.
Every task is done with a sharp focus on preventative maintenance, said Mark Dieno, superintendent of equipment integrity and reliability engineering.
Assets that are due for an upgrade fall under the to-do list for Turnaround crews, to take advantage of having the section shut down. This means equipment gets replaced often before the end of its lifespan, because the opportunity is there.
“We have to somehow get it all to fit together, like a big puzzle,” said Dieno, of the planning.
On the tail end, another 10 days are spent doing regulatory checks, to ensure things were put back together properly. This means inspection down to every bolt, said superintendent of process safety Megan Torrie.
“We check every single joint that we opened or touched,” said Torrie. “There’s a lot of work, after the big event that is Turnaround, but process safety is about keeping the process in the pipe.”
© KAYLE NEISSections four and five of the refinery continue to run as normal, while Turnaround crews focus on sections two and three this year, to maintain production and meet retail demand for refinery products.
Why do Turnaround?
While this blitz in the spring may be the busiest time of year for maintenance, Dieno clarified that inspectors keep constant tabs on the state of refinery assets.
Regular checks for wear and tear and performance are part of the operational routine, along with checks for industry benchmarks.
“We want to make sure equipment stays in a safe working order and the risk is minimized,” said Dieno.
Hillmer and crew actually use this comprehensive data to help plan the scope of work that will take place during Turnaround, sometimes in a way that feels a little like predicting the future.
The utmost priority of Turnaround is safety, emphasized Hillmer — of the workers, of processes at the complex and, in the bigger picture, of the entire city.
The 800-acre complex houses plenty of flammable and explosive material, which could pose a potentially terrifying disaster if anything were to happen on site.
“We want everyone who comes to work to go home at the end of the day, just the same or better than when they arrived,” said Torrie.
And with the refinery bordering the edge of Regina, safety consideration also extends beyond the site’s fenced-in limits.
Keeping the complex operating safely and reliably is “paramount,” said Dieno, and the largest driving force behind Turnaround maintenance.
“We have a low tolerance for allowing anything to happen,” said Dieno. “The things we’re doing are largely to prevent things from even getting close to happening.”
lkurz@postmedia.com
© KAYLE NEIS
A member of the Turnaround crew jet washes parts pulled out of the refomer in order to clean them of build-up and residue, before they are returned to their designated homes.
© KAYLE NEIS
© KAYLE NEIS
Regular refinery employees work alongside a huge influx of temporary contract workers to complete the maintenance project, over a very intense 45-day period beginning in April.
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