Neste Oil cable contract delivered on target despite freeze

Washington, UK - Tyco Thermal Controls has recently completed contracts for the supply and installation of power, control and heat-tracing cable systems for the Diesel Project at Neste Oil Oyj’s Porvoo Refinery in Finland. The project featured a Euro700 million investment in a new production line at Porvoo, to use residue oil for producing sulphur-free, clean motor fuels, in particular diesel fuel.

Main contractor Neste Jacobs Oy, awarded Tyco's Tracer project team the contracts to supply all the heat-tracing systems for process temperature maintenance and for the frost protection of transfer pipelines, vessels and instrumentation. This included supplying Tyco's Pyrotenax and Hew-Therm cabling products to meet Neste Oil's requirements for mineral-insulated and polymer-insulated constant wattage cables.

Tyco also won the two main installation contracts across the hydrogen unit and the residue hydro-cracking unit. In all, the company installed over 520km of power and control cabling and 320km of heating cables for the Diesel Project, along with the entire support infrastructure, and was involved in commissioning the heat-tracing systems.

During the project, the Tracer project team experienced significant delays to the piping schedule as well as a major increase of the power/cold scope which grew from an initial 250km up to the 520km. Tyco overcame these issues by ramping up its crew from 110 to some 400 installers and 50 site staff in an acceleration period, to meet new deadlines.

According to Tyco, its site team managed to keep everything on track through adverse winter weather conditions when temperatures dipped down to -20ºC with considerable snow. The installation team, it said, clocked-up over 470,000 man hours, without a single accident despite the harsh environment.