Working over 83,000 man hours on this project, Decker Electric delivered a safe, quality project to Koch Nitrogen. With the potential safety hazard of working in an active anhydrous ammonia facility during construction, Decker assigned two full-time safety managers on site to help mitigate potential risk exposure. The purpose of this project was to improve reliability of the existing aging electrical distribution to the plant. In addition, Koch Nitrogen needed to upgrade and improve their DCS/SIS controls system for additional control and safety for the operation of the plant.
There were several challenges on this project: safety and schedule. Safety because Decker Electric was working in an operating ammonia plant. Second was schedule. A Lean Construction Pull Plan schedule was utilized with the project team to coordinate structural, mechanical and electrical scopes to fit within the project timeframe. Due to the aggressive schedule, Decker did their best to get materials to the site and faced some lead time challenges that were able to be mitigated through many supplier relationships. Koch Nitrogren had a hard outage window that had to be hit and Decker did so successfully.
Decker Electric crews installed
- a new 2000A 4,160V dual fed service to the plant in a new pre-fabricated electrical building
- new feeders to over 400 existing motors from new motor control centers
- cable trays for both power and instrumentation
- new communication infrastructure for new DCS/SIS controls system
Decker Electric migrated over 700 existing instruments and installed over 500 new instruments to the controls system. This project for Koch Nitrogen was completed in six months and had over 83,000 man hours logged with a peak man power count of over 100 field personnel onsite.
