POWER August 2017 - 23

PLANT OF THE YEAR
4. A modular move. The 120-foottall
quench tower and 360-foot-tall absorber
tower were fabricated onsite and erected part
by part, as 40-foot-tall modules. This image
shows crews lifting a module of the absorber
tower in December 2015. Courtesy: TIC
core
values
of prioritizing
community,
health, safety, and environment, and high
ethical standards.
JX's decision to participate, however,
the project. Both MHI and Fluor provided
a FEED study on the larger system, and
MHI, which proposed a 10-fold increase of
its demonstration at Plant Barry, emerged as
the winner.
Greeson described the decision as a confident
one, noting that a typical scale-up
process of any technology is only sound if
limited to a factor of 10. " If you go more than
that, it's just really difficult to predict what's
going to happen, " he said. In the end, " What
we expected actually turned out to be true, "
said Greeson. " And that is as we quadrupled
the size [of the original proposal], we only
doubled the price. "
Going All Out to Reduce Risk
As an investor-owned company, NRG placed
elaborate emphasis on reducing risk, and
while it was sketching out the unique project,
it was also seeking a partner of the same
mindset and the same desire to help it achieve
success. Greeson recalled learning about JX
Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration Corp., the
sole upstream arm of oil and gas giant JXTG
Group, as a coincidence sometime in mid2012.
As JX Nippon's Takeo Tanei, who now
serves as vice president of Petra Nova Parish
Holdings-the 50-50 joint venture formed
between NRG and JX Nippon to build the
carbon capture project-remembers it, at
the time, JX was in the process of scoping
out new opportunities for project development
and production over the short term. It
was open to several possibilities, Tanei said,
as long as the project complied with JXTG's
August 2017 | POWER
was reached only after detailed deliberations
about just how much to invest, a call it had
to make while it was wrapping up financials
at the end of a fiscal year. Both NRG and JX
Nippon described the partnership as highly
compatible, especially considering their
corporate, industry, and cultural divide. For
NRG, the partnership immediately opened a
new avenue for funding with Japanese banks,
which considered JX Nippon's potential 25%
interest in the proposed 60 million barrels of
recovered oil from West Ranch. For JX Nippon,
the novel project has also been meaningful
for several reasons, including technology
growth and its effect on the environment.
Meanwhile, once the determination was
made to go with MHI's technology, NRG
and JX Nippon drew up a short list of construction
partners, eventually settling on
Kiewit-subsidiary TIC, a company that has
brought online a number of complex projects
across multiple markets, including for
NRG. Spearheading the project for TIC was
Robert Wolosyn, an industry veteran whose
leadership during the Petra Nova and other
construction projects earned him Kiewit's
largest and most prestigious Peter Kiewit
award this year. As he recalls, sometime in
November 2013, NRG and JX Nippon concluded
that if MHI and TIC agreed to work
together as a consortium, the two companies
would secure the engineering, procurement,
and construction contract.
It came with one catch, though: The project
owners gave the two firms only three
months to determine a project price. " We
worked for a couple months on costing the
project to see for sure if we were within the
boundaries of the pricing that was already put
forward-which we were, " said Wolosyn.
MHI's thorough FEED study provided nearly
everything needed to come up with a 100%
full estimate, he added. " And with some back
and forth between MHI and Petra Nova we
were able to come to a lump sum price [by
December 2013] that worked for everybody. "
Meanwhile, MHI, which had conducted a
year-long FEED study, pressed on with engineering
the project throughout the whole estimate
phase, assured that the project would
go to field. For NRG's Greeson, this was
pivotal to boosting project efficiency. In an
effort to cut risk, NRG and JX Nippon paid
the consortium to complete an estimated
20%-two to four times more than usual-of
project engineering before issuing the notice
to proceed, he noted.
" They had a very detailed 3-D model that
was a part of that design work so we could
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POWER POINTS
Winning Attributes
Petra Nova is the world's largest
post-combustion carbon capture
facility.
The $1 billion project was
delivered on time and on budget.
It utilizes a novel business model
to generate revenue for its
owners.
Project development and
construction was characterized
by unique collaboration, despite
industry and cultural divides.
see where there would be interferences or
where things didn't match up, " Greeson said.
" And they handled those during that part
of the process rather than when the pipefitters
from both sides end up having a miss
in the field. That didn't happen. Everything
matched up very well. "
That isn't to say that the project was bereft
of challenges (Figure 3). " I can't tell you how
many times I had to pull the team together
and tell them, 'I know this looks bad, but we
know we have a good project here and the
good news is we didn't get halfway through
construction and then discover that we had
this problem,' " Greeson said. NRG, for example,
encountered a major roadblock early
during the project's planning phase when a
major oil field it was negotiating with abruptly
stopped discussions, owing to crippling
legal problems.
Construction Kicks Off
Between January and July 2014, when it received
the final notice to proceed, the consortium
negotiated contracts with key equipment
suppliers, securing the heat recovery steam
generator from Nooter/Eriksen, a cooling
tower from SPX, and structural steel from
Cives Steel Co. Then a ceremony to break
ground on the project was held on September
2014, at the site where the team relocated a
large warehouse at the site of the project only
a month before.
According to Wolosyn, among the project's
most notable feats of construction were
to build the 120-foot-tall quench tower (Figure
4) and a 360-foot-tall absorber tower.
" And those were totally fabricated onsite in
our fabrication yard and brought to the area
where they were erected at, in 40-foot-tall
modules. So, there was basically, four modules
were built for the quencher tower and
four modules ended up being built for the
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POWER August 2017

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