ConocoPhillips' Wood River Refinery Nears Completion of $2 Billion Major Expansion Project

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--The $2 billion expansion of ConocoPhillips' (NYSE:COP) (Houston, Texas) 306,000-barrel-per-day (BBL/d) Wood River Refinery in Roxana, Illinois, is scheduled to be completed this spring. The major expansion began in November 2008 and is expected to increase capacity to 400,000 BBL/d and enable the refinery to produce sour Canadian crudes.

The bulk of the project consists of the addition of a delayed coker, along with a coke-handling system that was engineered and is now being constructed by Bechtel Group Incorporated (San Francisco, California). The scope includes installing a 65,000-BBL/d delayed coker with four coke drums, each measuring approximately 133 feet high and 33 feet in diameter. Bechtel is also handling the offsite utilities (OSBL) to support the new units. GRP Mechanical Incorporated (Bethalto, Illinois) was awarded the mechanical and piping contract. The OSBL will contain an additional 1 million linear feet of piping and pipe racks on the north and south sides of the plant. There will be two substations and two cooling towers.

CB&I (The Woodlands, Texas), a subsidiary of Chicago Bridge & Iron NV (NYSE:CBI) (Amsterdam, Netherlands), performed engineering for the 85 million-square-foot-per-day hydrogen unit, which includes a 1,275 million-Btu-per-hour reforming furnace and a 15,000-gallon-per-minute cooling water tank. The construction management portion of the unit was handled by Cherne Contracting Corporation (Eden Prairie, Minnesota). A new two-train, 400-ton-per-day sulfur recovery unit (SRU) utilizing Claus technology and supporting tail gas treating units with SCOT technology was also engineered by CB&I, and the Roxana, Illinois, office of URS Corporation (NYSE:URS) (San Francisco, California) was awarded the construction management contract located out of Roxana, Illinois.

The following projects included in the $2 billion expansion were engineered by with Cherne Contracting Corporation as the construction managers:

• the diesel hydrotreater (ULD-2) unit conversion project, consisting of restarting a 30,000-BBL/d cat feed hydrotreater and converting it to a diesel hydrotreater to produce ultra-low-sulfur diesel
• upgrades to the crude unit 1 (DU-1) and crude unit 2 (DU-2), including metallurgy upgrades for both units and a 50,000-BBL/d vacuum flasher (VF5) being installed on the DU-1 unit that will increase capacity from 120,000 BBL/d to 170,000 BBL/d
• restarting the 26,000-BBL/d FCCU 3 (UOP Design) in late 2010. The unit will include the addition of a wet gas scrubber to reduce SO2
• expansion of the 10 million-gallon-per-day wastewater treatment unit to support all the new units and major upgrades

While poor market conditions have affected many refineries, causing them to curb or cancel major investments until margins improve, CononoPhillips made the strategic decision to continue at full speed with the Wood River expansion project.

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