Coimbatore, India (December 12, 2018)
On August 8, 2018, a massive explosion rocked the site of India’s large government run refinery, followed by a serious fire on the compressor section that shut down the hydrocracking unit for safety reasons. The site was impacted with not only huge financial loss due to downtime, but also put the plants clean fuel demand objective at risk due to the loss of critical production. Within the week, Baker Hughes’s service team was called in to conduct a comprehensive study of the damage to the equipment, and found (22) of the critical severe service valves on the Amine and Sour service gas sections were impacted to various degrees by the fire.
“Many of the severe service valves that we supply are chosen because they are designed to optimize the customers’ operations. When we learned these valves were damaged, we didn’t waste time assembling a plan to get replacements to site as quick as possible,” said Murugavel Jayavelu, GM of Baker Hughes Valves India. At the end of audit it was determined the site required 675 new parts, and 3 complete specialty valves to be delivered before the end of the year. Muruga added, “We immediately went to work producing the majority of the parts from our local plant in Coimbatore, India, but also reached out to the US, Italy, and Japan for their support on some of the components that were critical path to produce locally in India.”
On December 12, 2018, Baker Hughes shipped the final components to the site, 15 days ahead of the customer’s requested schedule, where they met with our local service team who had been coordinating with the site to commission the affected valves. This full team effort reached out across continents to leverage the full capability of Baker Hughes, while providing the local service and support from the customers own region.