GE Oil & Gas has completed the first cycle of gas turbines modular replacement project at the Qatargas liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant in Ras Laffan, using a new maintenance strategy that allowed Qatargas to save more than one week of production.
Shutdown of an LNG plant means loss of production during that day, so the main goal for the customer is to reduce this downtime, shortening the maintenance window.
Scope of the project
The scope of the project included the major inspection of 15 GE Frame gas turbines operating on Qatargas LNG trains 1, 2 and 3 .
A GE Frame 5 gas turbine has to undertake a major inspection at every 48,000 hours and usually takes 28 days for its completion.
During a major inspection, the machine is completely dismounted on site where the people can count on limited resources for disassembly, inspection and reassembly activities.
Modular replacement strategy
GE's new maintenance strategy enabled it to remove the constraint of the time for performing maintenance on the equipment.
By applying the company's modular replacement strategy in a cascade process, it was possible to keep downtime to a minimum.
Increased production time
The success of this project supports the goal of Qatargas to become the largest LNG producer in the world.
Qatar increased LNG production time by approximately one week per outage, a company statement said.
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