Atlantic to stakeholders: Work together on energy sector upkeep

Atlantic is calling on the local energy sector to collaborate to optimise the use of manpower and other resources in the maintenance of upstream and downstream production facilities. The topic was raised by Jeff Baillie, Atlantic’s director of shutdowns, contractual service agreements and projects, who was speaking at last week’s Energy Chamber conference at the Hyatt Regency Trinidad hotel, Dock Road, Port-of-Spain. “Maintenance is an essential contribution to the service life of any process plant operation,” Baillie said in a company statement. “It ultimately influences total facility production. However, manpower is the essential component to maintenance, and Atlantic wants to call on the local energy sector to work together to ensure that we optimise how existing manpower is deployed for everyone’s mutual benefit.” Atlantic, the world’s seventh largest producer of liquefied natural gas (LNG), has four natural gas liquefaction units (trains), including Train 4, until recently the world’s largest train.

 

At the heart of the company’s production capacity is its fleet of 27 GE Frame 5 turbine compressors, the largest fleet in the world. The company said that Atlantic’s turbine complement also boasts the world’s highest availability rate—99.45 per cent—a measure of the equipment’s actual capacity available for processing. Describing Atlantic’s recent experience in the annual maintenance of its facility, Baillie explained that routine maintenance entailed outages to service the company’s turbine fleet. Atlantic’s maintenance outages employ some 2,000 artisans, craftsmen and technicians over month-long periods, and also require large quantities of equipment, including scaffolding and giant cranes. 

“This often puts pressure on supply of these services at other facilities or even other locations in the country,” Baillie explained. 

 

“This is further complicated whenever Atlantic’s maintenance coincides with maintenance at Point Lisas facilities or even upstream with the gas suppliers.” Baillie described the local sector’s annual maintenance cycle as contributing to “peaks and troughs” in the annual demand for service provider firms. “There are periods of very low demand and periods of very high demand. This doesn’t help create optimal use of resources, and it also doesn’t help some of the firms offer stable employment,” Baillie said in the statement. “We may all need to work together to spread our maintenance activity throughout the year, or help give the contractor companies greater sight of our annual plans so that they too can plan ahead for recruitment and training." Another complication identified by Baillie was the shortage of contractors with health, safety and environment (HSE) certification to do some of the higher-risk maintenance activities.

 

He said that initiatives such as the Energy Chamber’s Safe-To-Work (STOW) and the safety passport programme of the Point Lisas Employers Association (PLEA) only partially addressed this challenge.   

“We need HSE training opportunities that are consistent in their depth of approach. The local sector also needs to develop a universally agreed minimum core curriculum for training for high-risk activities,” Baillie explained. “These solutions require a multilateral approach, with upstream speaking with downstream, downstream speaking with downstream, and everybody speaking with the contractor companies,” Baillie said. “In these challenging times in the global energy market, we have to work together to keep T&T as a competitive source of natural gas and petrochemicals to global markets.”