Plant up and running 12 hours after critical chiller shut down

A Gulf Coast chemical manufacturer of oxo derivative and intermediate products including alcohols, polyols, carboxylic acids, specialty esters, and amines experienced a failure in a critical chiller that shut down its entire Gulf Coast plant. A plant manager estimates a financial loss of over $1,000,000 each day the plant was down. The incident occurred over the weekend and there was great concern that locating a replacement chiller with sufficient capacity would be challenging.

Aggreko deployed a replacement chiller and had it running along with a 1500kW generator within a day. It was originally expected that the temporary chiller would be necessary for only a few days until the plant’s permanent chiller could be fixed. However, after inspection the plant learned it would take over a month to complete its repairs.

Due to this longer time interval, the Aggreko generator was scheduled to be taken down for quick maintenance within two weeks. However, twelve days into the rental, Aggreko Remote Monitoring (ARM), a service that monitors and transmits critical information about Aggreko’s rental equipment, sent an alert to the Remote Operating Center (ROC) that the generator was running, but there was no load. This seemed unusual to the Aggreko technicians who immediately contacted the plant to assess onsite activity. Aggreko was informed the plant had an electrical emergency that had forced them to fix its switchgear, thus Aggreko utilized this time and quickly mobilized a crew to the plant where they performed necessary generator maintenance. This quick action averted another shutdown.

Aggreko’s quick action both right after the initial chiller failure and during the unexpected switchgear issue, literally saved the client millions of dollars.