The Whiting Refinery Modernization Project achieved a major milestone on Saturday, when the new Vacuum Tower for 12 Pipestill Revamp was safely lifted and installed on its foundation. Referred to as “T-102,” the nearly 1.7-million-pound tower was the fifth and final lift of a large vessel that Mammoet’s huge PTC crane made on the 12 Pipestill Revamp site.
John Menzies, BP’s Project Director for the WRMP, called it the single largest critical lift of the project, and said it fulfills one of the leadership team’s most “Nothing else this heavy will be lifted this high” on the WRMP, added Mark Hunter, BP’s Construction Interface Manager for 12 Pipestill Revamp. “It was exciting and amazing to see, especially with the occasional flyover from the Chicago Air and Water Show.”
Nearly 166 feet tall and 45.5 feet in diameter at its widest point, the Vacuum Tower was lifted 83 feet off the ground, with the top of the vessel soaring nearly 250 feet into the air before it was lowered into its five-level, octagonal concrete foundation. The crane’s hook reached more than 300 feet high during the lift.
The job was executed safely, perfectly and on schedule, Hunter said.
After a pre-lift meeting that was convened early on Saturday morning, the lift began at 7:00 a.m. and took about five-and-a-half hours to complete, including approximately 90 minutes to move the Vacuum Tower from a horizontal to a vertical position.
Mammoet, the Netherlands-based company that specializes in moving and lifting heavy equipment, was in charge of lifting the Vacuum Tower. Once the vessel was raised from a horizontal to a vertical position and suspended upright, it was slewed — or moved sideways by the crane — and then hoisted over its foundation. At that point the boilermaker contractor CTI — working for Fluor, 12 Pipestill Revamp’s engineering, procurement and construction-management contractor — assumed responsibility for setting the tower’s flange over 32 anchor bolts on the foundation’s concrete tabletop. A crew of CTI boilermakers ascended personnel scaffolding around the top of the foundation to go to work as the tower was lowered and then bolted into place.
“Mammoet got it vertical and CTI took it over the bolts,” Hunter said. “Everyone performed flawlessly, professionally and with intense resolve.”

On the WRMP, "Nothing else this heavy will be lifted as high. It was exciting and amazing to see."
--Mark Hunter, BP's Construction Interface Manager for 12 Pipestill Revamp

As with all heavy lifts on the Whiting project, detailed layers of planning and safety checks preceded the work to raise and set the Vacuum Tower. But this time, the pre-lift rigor was even more thorough. Besides following WRMP procedures for critical lifts and obtaining all necessary safety permits, the 12 Pipestill team also took “additional, extraordinary steps” to inspect the crane and vessel lugs, Hunter said.
On Wednesday, three days before the lift, the Vacuum Tower was moved under the hook of the giant crane to prepare for going vertical. On Wednesday and Thursday crews built the tailing device that would rotate on a horseshoe-shaped saddle to stabilize the bottom of the Vacuum Tower during the lift.

Late last week, as the morning of the big lift drew nearer, the 12 Pipestill team was not sure that the job would be done on Saturday, as thunderstorms threatened the weather forecast. For safety reasons, the lift would be delayed if there were wind gusts over 20 miles per hour or any sign of thunderstorms. But Saturday ended up being a hot, sunny August day, with clear skies and temperatures in the 80s.
After the job was successfully completed, a sense of pride and accomplishment was evident on the part of all those involved.
“The day wrapped up over six months of planning by Fluor rigging engineers, CTI boilermakers, Lowther-Rolton lifting consultants, Mammoet engineering and 12 Pipestill construction management,” Hunter said in an e-mail message. “The outstanding planning and design facilitated easy uprighting by Mammoet’s PTC and transporter crews. And the 12 Pipestill Revamp team thanks all who were directly involved and also those who assisted, such as 12 Pipestill Operations, Whiting security, the WRMP’s Integrated Project Management Team, Santis, Superior Construction, Certified Safety, Swift Oil & Gas, and ACMS.”

Bill Fenner, Superior Construction’s General Superintendent for all 12 Pipestill Revamp construction forces, echoed Hunter’s sentiment that the Vacuum Tower lift was a team effort. “The project team can be very proud, because a lot of people put forth a lot of effort to get us to this point,” Fenner said.
Now that the tower has been installed on its pedestal, “it looks a lot bigger up in the air than it did on the ground,” he added. And while it’s a good feeling to see the tower installed, “it’s also a little intimidating, because it makes you realize how much work still needs to be done” — including the erection of additional scaffolding so that the tower’s remaining insulation can be installed and additional platforms can be mounted on the vessel, plus internal equipment and external piping that will need to be installed and connected.
“It opens up a lot of work for a lot of people,” Fenner said.

A Big Tower for a Big Job
In the modernized Whiting Refinery, the Vacuum Tower will upgrade residual material that it receives from the bottom of 12 Pipestill’s new Crude Fractionator. Using high temperatures and low pressures, the Vacuum Tower will distill additional gas oil from the residue, and the gas oils will then be fed to Whiting’s cat cracker and converted to high-value gasoline. Without the Vacuum Tower, the resid would leave the refinery as lower-value asphalt. Whiting’s new Coker will also upgrade the resid to produce more gas oils — which is why the Coker team considers the Vacuum Tower the “Coker-feed unit,” Hunter said.
Once it goes into operation in 2012, the new Vacuum Tower will have the capacity to process more than twice as much resid as the plant’s current unit does, allowing the refinery to handle the higher levels of resid found in heavier crudes.
Whiting’s existing Vacuum Tower dates back to the 1950s, but has undergone regular maintenance over the years. It’s smaller than the new vessel — 123 feet tall by 38 feet in diameter at its largest cylinder section, compared to the new tower’s 166-foot height and 45.5-foot diameter. But more significant is that the internal volume of the new tower almost doubles that of the existing tower, and at nearly 1.7-million pounds the new tower weighs two-and-a-half times more than the one it will replace.
 
Safely Lifting and Installing the Vaccum Tower" was an " Important step in our journey to make Whiting the most productive and effecient refnery in North America and a workplace that everyone can be proud of ."
-- John Menzies ,BP's Project Director for the WRMP

The new Vacuum Tower was fabricated for the WRMP by IDESA in Spain, one of the few shops in the world large enough to build the huge piece of equipment indoors, which was a significant factor in its quality control. Fabrication of the Vacuum Tower took about a year and a half to complete, beginning in fall of 2007 and finishing in the first quarter of 2009. The vessel then crossed the Atlantic Ocean by ship. After being transferred to a barge at Montreal on the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Vacuum Tower was delivered to the Whiting Refinery dock on June 15, 2009.
At Whiting, the tower’s foundation, or pedestal, stands nearly 87 feet tall. It took more than nine months to build, and was completed in early October of last year. The foundation consists of four octagonal ring beams made of reinforced concrete, supported by eight vertical columns. All told, some 1,746 cubic yards of concrete were poured to build the foundation, and 190 tons of rebar were used.
While the Vacuum Tower is the largest vessel to be lifted for the entire Whiting project, it is not the heaviest. That distinction belongs to a pair of main reactor vessels for the project’s Gas Oil Hydrotreater unit, which each weigh nearly two million pounds and were lifted and set on their

foundations by the PTC crane in February of this year.
Mammoet’s Platform Twin-Ring Containerized (PTC) crane is one of the world’s largest land-based cranes in terms of size and capacity. It has a maximum lifting height of 180 meters (about 594 feet), and a weight capacity of 1,600 metric tonnes (about 1,760 short tons, or 3.5 million pounds). The crane was shipped to Whiting disassembled, in 110 containers carried on as many trucks, and then assembled onsite. For 12 Pipestill alone, the crane lifted 21 modules and five vessels: the Vacuum Tower, the Crude Fractionator, the Crude Flash Drum, the Stripper tower, and the Vacuum Heaters Stack.
With the PTC crane’s final lift on the 12 Pipestill Revamp site now complete, the leadership team of the Whiting Refinery Modernization Project has met one of its major goals for this year.
“The WRMP’s extended leadership team signed off on a commitment statement during one of our early critical issues sessions,” Menzies said by e-mail. “It included our intent to visibly change the Whiting skyline in 2010. Having earlier erected the two main Gas Oil Hydrotreater reactors, each weighing in at 1,000 tons, it was pleasing this weekend to have completed the lift of the massive Vacuum Distillation Tower up into its elevated structure. This lift by the 12 Pipestill team complements lifts already completed for several other 12 Pipestill vessels, including the Crude Distillation Tower.”
Every time the PTC crane is moved to a new location within the refinery, it must be broken down and then reassembled. Now that the Vacuum Tower has been successfully lifted and set, the PTC’s next job will start in September, when it begins lifting heavy equipment for the WRMP’s new Coker. In the Coker area, the crane will be used to “complete the remaining, skyline-changing lifts of the six Coke drums before the end of 2010,” Menzies said.
“These are important steps in our journey to make Whiting the most productive and efficient refinery in North America, and a workplace that everyone can be proud of.”