1st module shipment for Cianbro delayed Estimated date pushed back to January

BREWER – No one is pointing fingers, but when Cianbro’s Eastern Manufacturing Facility ships out its first barge of modules to a Texas oil refinery it will be two months later than originally planned.

Motiva Enterprises LLC hired Pittsfield-based Cianbro Corp. to build 52 refinery modules for the Motiva Port Arthur Refinery, which is in the middle of a $7 billion expansion that will make it the largest crude oil processing plant in North America.

Cianbro officials have said November would be the month they would load four completed refinery modules – heavy-duty industrial steel frames filled with pipe, pumps and electronics – onto a massive barge for the trip to the Gulf of Mexico. That date has changed.

“We’re probably going to ship the first one in January,” Mick Heim, project manager for Motiva, said Friday. “It’s not really a Cianbro problem. It’s not really a Motiva problem. We expect those things.”

Joe Cote, Eastern Manufacturing Facility general manager, said logistics is playing a part in the deferred shipping date.

“I wouldn’t call it a delay,” he said Monday. “We’re working closely with the client to [create] the best shipping schedule we can. It’s a very large undertaking.”

He added later, “The delivery date can slide. This is really Motiva’s call. They’re providing the materials and we’re assembling things to the best of our ability.”

Four module plants, three in the United States and one in Mexico, are building pieces for the Port Arthur expansion, which is the largest capital project ever undertaken in Texas.

With a limited number of barges big enough to handle the refinery modules, which can weigh up to 1,200 tons, Motiva has “three people, working full time, planning barge schedules,” Heim said.

“With this many pieces of a puzzle coming together at one time, there are going to be slow days and there are going to be days [where things] speed up,” he said.

Scheduling the leased barges so no time is wasted is the challenge, Heim said.

“We want to be able to ship those out as soon as they’re done,” he said.

The large barges can carry up to four modules, and will take about 24 days to complete the trip from Brewer to Port Arthur, Texas.

Cianbro is building the catalytic-cracker-feed hydrotreater and hydrocracker units for the expansion project, and has a dozen modules under way, Cote said.

Even with the shipping delay, the 15-month window for completing the modules hasn’t changed, he said.

Cianbro chose the site of the shuttered Eastern Fine Paper Co. mill, which closed in January 2004, for its Eastern Manufacturing Facility and spent 10 months changing the abandoned mill site into a module-producing facility with 500 well-paying jobs. Work on the modules began in April.

The Texas refinery, which produces Shell Oil brand products, processes about 275,000 barrels of fuel a day when up and running. It will process about 600,000 barrels a day once the $7 billion expansion is complete, which is expected in 2010.

“Everything is going about the way I thought it would be right now,” Heim said.

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