Ohmstede Opens State-of-the-Art Heat Exchanger Cleaning Facility in La Porte

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--You could say that Ohmstede Limited (Beaumont, Texas) was in the right place at the right time when oil was discovered at Spindletop at the turn of the century. Since then, Ohmstede, now a subsidiary of EMCOR Group Incorporated (NYSE:EME) (Norwalk, Connecticut), has grown from a mom and pop fabricator in Beaumont, Texas, to a fixture on the Gulf Coast. For a service company to survive that long, it must employ an atmosphere of innovation, where customer service always comes first. Ohmstede operates six shops and seven field service locations in Texas, Louisiana and California.

Last Week, Ohmstede held a grand opening ceremony for an innovative, industry leading, $7 million heat exchanger offsite cleaning facility, which gives the company the ability to clean an excess of 100 heat exchanger bundles per week from area refineries and petrochemical plants. Ohmstede will be the first shop on the Gulf Coast to recycle hydro test water, as part of an innovative new addition to the company's existing fabrication shop in La Porte, Texas. The new facility will enable the company to perform full service heat exchanger cleaning, including; push-pull of bundles, transportation, cleaning, testing and repair, all in house, allowing customers to take full advantage of the only single source provider of blind to blind services, as opposed to contracting those services out to several contractors.

According to Bret Bettison, general manager for the La Porte Facility, the new facility will clean shell and tube heat exchangers, including tube bundles for major turnaround outages. "We will be able to handle all offsite cleaning requirements for bundles for major turnaround outages, as well as handling our customer's routine cleaning of bundles at any time throughout the year," states Bettison. Bundles are staged for nondestructive examination and customer inspections. Any discoverable repairs that may be required can be performed quickly at the La Porte shop or at one of Ohmstede's other facilities. "This provides our customers the security of having one single source provider for all of their heat exchanger needs. Ohmstede has made the commitment to expand our role as the industry leader of shell and tube heat exchanger services," said Bettison.

The facility features multiple cleaning fixtures. The shell-side fixtures utilize the highest volume pumps in the industry. The tube-side fixtures provide cleaning pressures between 20,000 and 40,000 pounds per square inch. Along with the repair facilities, these features make Ohmstede the only full-service cleaning and repair company with six shops located across the U.S.

Ohmstede's new cleaning operation at La Porte meets all the latest requirements from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The waste-handling operations will remove solids and all solid waste will be treated as KO-50 waste and disposed of at a proper facility. All water used in the cleaning process is treated and recycled on site, with water continually monitored for pH, suspended solids and free chlorides.

The La Porte shop also features a thermal bake-out oven that has a maximum capacity of 100,000 pounds (lbs). The oven will handle anything from hydrocarbon deposits to polymer fouling. Through the pyrolysis process, fouling is reduced to a soft ash, which is washed off prior to testing. The oven allows bundles to be cleaned that normal water blasting operation would not clean.

Dirty heat exchanger bundles are transported to Ohmstede's facilities using specially designed, environmentally secure trailers that will transport a unit weighing up to 80,000 lbs. The La Porte facility currently has five covered truck/trailer units and four open trucks, and is seeking to add two more covered trucks in the next 12 months. All trucks are GPS dispatched and tracked and Ohmstede maintains annual overweight permits from the Texas Department of Transportation.

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