Sharing real-world case studies and lessons learned from successful maintenance and reliability initiatives, Air Products LNG Machinery Lead Christopher Elko believes being organized and proactive are key tenets to achieving operational excellence and regulatory compliance in the LNG sector.
How to actually quantify operational excellence and make sure all employees understand that daily goals and compliance are a team effort and not a competition is a starting point, Elko said.
"There are a number of times that I’ve been out in the field and there’s a very heavy ‘us and them’ mentality between the operations folks and the maintenance folks," he said. "Each team member adds value to all of the efforts to keep the plant running. We like to foster a very inclusive environment.
"On one hand, the production team wants to make as much product and profit as possible. On the other hand, the maintenance folks don’t want you to break anything or hurt anyone. Really, these are the same goal, following the same pattern and logic," he added.
Elko presented these best practices during the 2024 LNG Export North America Conference & Exhibition at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston.
Excellence for front-end operations and field activities should involve proper record-keeping, documentation and adherence to procedures, Elko told attendees.
Trying to keep that balance between safe and reliable operations and operating discipline is also important, though at times hard to achieve.
"We have some very ambitious operators, and we appreciate their testimonials saying they can get a little bit more out of the equipment, but that may not be optional," he said. Environmental factors also play a role, including weather and site location, he added.
Christopher Elko
Christopher Elko with Air Products speaks during the 2024 LNG Export North America Conference & Exhibition.
"If you have a facility being installed very close to a coastline where you might have that salty sea air, you’re going to have a shorter time between maintenance and activities for those turbines, for example," he said. "That all needs to be considered."
Utilizing computerized maintenance management software to configure the jobs and automatically generate them is a helpful measure, he said.
"It’s straightforward, works like a charm and gets the equipment the attention it needs before it breaks," Elko said. "By monitoring the condition of a piece of equipment you can determine the health and look at the trends and say, okay, this is approaching the problem date."
As far as managing costs, Elko said investing in a robust reliability program and adopting an AI-based maintenance plan can save money.
Equipment downtime, and all of the maintenance and budget challenges those periods can usher in, need to be looked at realistically, Elko said.
"The gas turbines driving the process are going to want to come down at least every 8,000 hours," he said. "The target number of downtime days we want is zero, of course. But I would assert that anything lower than about two weeks or so is normal."
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