GE Oil & Gas has completed the first cycle of gas turbines modular project at a Qatargas LNG plant, increasing its production time by about one week per outage.
A day of shutdown of an LNG plant means loss of production during that day, so operators aim to reduce this downtime and shortening the maintenance window.
“The implementation of this new maintenance philosophy allowed Qatargas to save more than one week of production while GE has been able to remove the constraint of the time for performing maintenance on the equipment,” the company said.
The scope of the project included the major inspection of 15 GE Frame gas turbines operating on Qatargas LNG trains 1, 2 and 3. A GE Frame 5 gas turbine has to undertake a major inspection at every 48,000 hours and usually takes 28 days for its completion.
During a major inspection, the machine is completely dismounted on site where the people can count on limited resources for disassembly, inspection and reassembly activities.
Learning from previous experience in the GE Aviation business, GE Oil & Gas adapted the "Modular Replacement" method for Frame 5 machines.
This new maintenance strategy is carried out by replacing the entire engine instead of dismounting the machine on site. The new module is started up immediately after installation while the used one will be repaired in a new workshop developed by GE close to the site as a scope of this project.
Citing the success of this project, the International Project Management Association (IPMA) recently granted to GE the 2011 IPMA Project Excellence Award for Big-Sized Projects.
Gas News | Middle East
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