PROJECT
PROFILES

ExxonMobil Plastics G-Line Project

This project won a 2004 ABC National Excellence In Construction Merit Award , LA Contractor Magazine's Best Electrical / Instrumentation Project of 2004 and an ABC Pelican Chapter Award of Merit.

Baton Rouge, LA - On October 30, 2001, Industrial Specialty Contractors, LLC (ISC) signed a lump-sum instrumentation and electrical contract with Mitsui Engineering & Shipbuilding, Inc. and ExxonMobil Chemical for a new “greenfield” plastics plant called G-Line near north Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the first of its kind in the world. The value of ISC’s work, including several related contracts with other civil and mechanical contractors, totaled more than $15 million.

ISC associates worked more than 300,000 hours on the project over its 25-month life span. Their responsibilities included all temporary power, underground electrical feeders, above-ground electrical lines and instrumentation – including pneumatic tubing, fiber optics and electronics in every part of the new plant – from the poly area, tank farm, flare structure and cooling tower to the multipurpose building, packaging & shipping, and all three electrical substations. At its peak the project employed more than 220 ISC craftsmen.

Their work included 3 complete substations, along with all transformers and supporting switchgear, bus duct, underground duct banks, direct-buried cable, cable tray and conduit systems. ISC also created a plant-wide grounding system, installed area lighting and street lighting, and set up and connected an HVAC package. Emergency notification and fire-alarm systems were also installed by ISC craftsmen, as were15 lighting panels, 15 transformers and nearly 900 light fixtures.

The hub of ISC’s instrumentation work was a new I/O building housing a new distributed control System (DCS) linked to the new G-Line control room and back to the base plant via nearly half a mile of fiber optic cable. More than 800 instruments were installed and checked, a massive undertaking in its own right that required completion and check-out of more than 2,400 loops.

Calibration and specification checks on all field devices were also part of ISC’s work scope, along with all related cable tray, conduit systems, and home-run and secondary cabling. ISC was responsible for all loop checks and provided start-up assistance, as well.

When their work was complete, ISC craftsmen had installed nearly a million feet of wire and cable in almost 30 miles of conduit, using nearly 20,000 feet of cable tray and 40,000 feet of support material. The instrument air supply alone required more than 13,500 feet of piping, but ISC also installed 7,323 feet of process tubing; 13,814 feet of air-supply tubing; 5,619 feet of steam trace tubing and 8,933 feet of analyzer tubing.

ISC retained two subcontractors for electrical testing of equipment and cable and for scaffolds, Electro Test, Inc. and Brand Scaffolding, but their work totaled just 2% of the contract’s total value. ISC completed this enormous project without a single lost-time safety incident, turning over the last of the new systems eight weeks ahead of schedule.