PROJECT
PROFILES

Motiva Norco Refining East Reinstrumentation Project

This project won a 2008 ABC National Eagle Award for Excellence In Construction and an ABC Bayou Chapter Award of Excellence.

On October 6, 2003, Emerson Process Services awarded a lump-sum contract to Industrial Specialty Contractors, L.L.C. (ISC) for electrical and instrumentation construction, along with a cost-reimbursable contract for turnaround and hot cut-over of instrumentation systems at Motiva’s Norco Refinery.  The contract value totaled approximately $14,200,000.
Project mobilization began with front end loading (FEL) assistance, design and constructability reviews in January, 2003. Field installation work began in October of 2003 and the last cutovers were completed in February of 2008. 
Work was planned in three phases: pre-turnaround construction, turnaround, and post-turnaround cut-over, with emphasis on the start and completion of each turnaround. ISC scheduling ensured that all seven units were ready for each of the planned turnarounds several days in advance.

Project scope included consolidation of five separate control rooms in the Refining East Control Building (RECB) – a single, integrated control center with 6,000 I/O's (data channels) located outside the plant blast zone.  ISC responsibilities included 636 digital valve controllers and installation of digital automation systems in seven key process units – the coker, hydrocracker, two catalytic reformers, a diesel hydrotreater, a naphtha hydrotreater and a hydrogen unit.

ISC's work also included fiber-optic cabling and associated equipment, along with control hardware, Delta-V and Triconex systems in the new RECB. This required 12 new cabinets, hundreds of terminations and more than two miles of Cat 5 communication cable to create the network and set up the operator stations.    
The new instrumentation communicates via Emerson's Delta-V digital automation equipment using the Foundation Fieldbus protocol.  Segment design required installation of some 500 Interlink junction bricks, temperature control modules and 120 instrument junction boxes.  Junction brick location plans were included in ISC's contract as a constructability item.

The primary cable raceway alone required over 50,000 feet of channel tray and 80,000 feet of conduit. ISC installed another 4,500 feet of cable tray and supports plus 120,000 feet of multi-pair cabling and 200,000 feet of instrument and control wiring elsewhere.  Nearly 3,500 Foundation Fieldbus cables with pre-molded ends were also installed, each an average of 30 meters long, along with 17,000 feet of power cable.  Power and control systems required over 50,000 wiring terminations.

ISC associates installed more than 6,000 new instrument tag items requiring more than seven miles of alloy 825 tubing and stainless steel and pre-insulated tubing, plus associated raceway and supports.  They ran control wiring to all existing unit pumps and motors, along with digital I/O interfaces to communicate the status of the new automatic controls to the Delta-V monitors and controllers installed by ISC in the new control room.

The existing kitchen in the hydrocracking unit (HCU) control room was converted into a rack room for HCU and hydrogen plant controls, and this involved the only other firm ISC used on the project – a merit contractor who installed the air-conditioning system. ISC self-performed 99% of the work, which required 255,385 man hours over a 53-month period.