The Making of a Megaproject

By Amy Mason Doan
Photographs by Iain Masterton

It’s likely that every synonym for “big” in Chinese and English has been used to describe the CSPC Nanhai Petrochemicals Complex in southern China’s Guangdong Province. With its 427-hectare (1,055-acre) work site sprawled along the coastline, its projected workforce of more than 20,000, and its implications for the future of the manufacturing industry in China, the Nanhai project is engineering and construction on a dramatic scale.

It is also a bit of Chinese history. In March 2001, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation and Shell Petrochemicals Company Limited (CSPC) chose BSF, a consortium of Bechtel, Sinopec Engineering, and Foster Wheeler Energy, to deliver the $4.3 billion complex, one of the largest Sino-foreign capital investments to date.

Nanhai is a rarity in the petrochemicals world, because the massive, highly integrated complex is being built from the ground up. “We started from absolute white paper,” says Bechtel Project Director Steve Katzman. “There aren’t too many giant grassroots petrochemicals projects these days. Usually, you’re building onto existing facilities.”

The definition phase alone took a year and a half and required collaboration among engineers from 15 countries, including China, Singapore, Japan, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Italy, and the United States. Plans were drawn up for 11 chemical units, including a naphtha cracker that will produce 800,000 tonnes of ethylene and 430,000 tonnes of propylene a year.

The cracker uses heat and pressure to decompose heavy oils and separate the lighter ethylene, which is then used to form polyethylene—familiar plastic. When it is completed in 2005, the complex also will include other units (styrene monomer/propylene oxide, and polypropylene), a polymer warehouse and packaging facility, and a waste treatment center, along with 56 other buildings.

The finished complex will include approximately 38,000 instruments spread across the vast site, so designing an efficient diagnostics and control system to keep production running smoothly became a project in itself. Early in the front-end design phase, BSF’s Plant Automation Group conducted a study of the new Foundation Fieldbus digital communication standard. Control systems shift computing power away from central controllers out to field equipment such as sensors and actuators, effectively creating a local area network. The networking protocol has been available commercially since 1996, but it has only been widely accepted in the past two years. CSPC’s partial adoption of the standard at Nanhai is one of the largest implementations in the world today.

The new method for monitoring equipment reduces operation and maintenance costs because it makes instruments “smarter” so they can report diagnostic information—equipment fouling or a cavitating pump, for example. And because it’s an open standard rather than a proprietary one, it allows instruments from different vendors to communicate with each other.

The location for the complex was chosen because of its proximity to Hong Kong and the shipping lanes of the South China Sea. Guangdong Province is one of the country’s major industrial centers, but the Nanhai project site consisted mainly of farmland before 2001.

Site preparation began in late 2002, with more than 16 million cubic meters of earth moved, and roads and other infrastructure built from scratch. Local authorities carried out an extensive resettlement program that has relocated more than 8,300 people in 2,700 households, and BSF works closely with CSPC to develop skill-specific job training programs to help restore their livelihood. Nearly 600 resettled villagers are working on the job site.

Just as construction of major plant and infrastructure was beginning in early 2003, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) threat in Guangdong forced project personnel into isolation mode. Katzman credits his team for dealing with the crisis cautiously but calmly; the workforce stayed healthy and no significant time was lost due to the scare.

The first of 18,000 piles was driven in May 2003. But after much of the infrastructure had been built, the team was in for more drama. A double-eyed typhoon, the first to hit the area in 25 years, began bearing down on the coast in September. Luckily, employees had several days of warning and were able to take cover in concrete apartment buildings. Buildings swayed and windows shattered, but there were no major injuries. The typhoon destroyed most of the site’s temporary structures and did $4 million in damage, but had only a marginal impact on the schedule.

While foundations for the offices, furnaces, and towers again took shape, the project’s “Marine Team” began constructing docks and harbors along with a material offloading facility (MOF). The one-kilometer causeway and MOF structure hold concrete caissons that can receive barges of up to 4,000 tonnes. When the MOF passed government inspection in November 2003, it signaled the beginning of the major mechanical erection phase of the project.

Engineering will be complete in August 2004, and commissioning of utilities will get under way in the third quarter. Katzman anticipates that the plant will be ready for startup by September 2005 as planned, and he’s clear on who deserves credit.“I have the best project team in the world,” he says.

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