BREWER – There is a clock in the production trailer at Cianbro’s Eastern Manufacturing Facility that is counting down the days, hours and seconds until the first four building modules are to be shipped by barge to a Texas oil refinery.

The digital clock, with its ever-changing red numbers, is a constant reminder that there is a November deadline, and it’s fast approaching.

Cianbro Corp.’s ambitious project to change the old Eastern Fine Paper Co. mill site into a building module manufacturing facility – one of only four in the country – already has changed and revitalized the defunct 100-year-old riverfront industrial locale into an active workplace.

And building of the modules has begun. Large steel structures, visible from South Main Street and across the river, are arising from two different locations on the 41-acre site.

“We’re starting to put up the steel right now” for the first two modules, Cheryl Brackett, Cianbro lead work pack engineer, said last week. “We have to build the steel, [and] there are a lot of pieces.”

Approximately 200 people already are working at the Eastern Manufacturing Facility, which eventually will employ more than 500 skilled laborers building the modules. The first contract for Cianbro, a Pittsfield-based construction company, is to make 52 modules in a 15-month window for Motiva Port Arthur Refinery, which is in the middle of a $7 billion expansion that will make the facility the largest crude oil processing plant in North America.

Every piece of steel or piping for the refinery’s modules is formed in Brewer into exactly what the project needs, and is checked and double-checked to make sure it is exactly right before it is given a bar code. The bar codes are used later in the building process to ensure the right piece is used.

“We’re building it block by block,” Brackett said. “It’s broken down to [500-hour] work packages.”

Modules can be used for basically any industry where prefabricated, self-standing building structures would be useful, including pharmaceutical, power, cement, transportation, liquid natural gas, petrochemical, marine, nuclear and others.

For Motiva, the refinery modules are basically heavy-duty steel frames with piping and a few utilities.

“Once the whole steel base is constructed, we have the task of adding the piping,” Brackett said.

She was sitting in front of a 24-inch computer screen loaded with ConstructSim software that allowed her to use a joystick to highlight different components of the modules. Brackett could highlight one piece of pipe and show its dimensions, components and find out where it belongs, or she could select an entire week’s worth of piping or steel or the entire module.

“We bring the crews in here to look at the model and they figure out how to actually rig this up to get [items] inside the module,” Brackett said. The software is specific enough that “we can zoom right in and look at a valve. This shows everything, [including] where the bolts go.”

To demonstrate, she selected a small pipe in one of the refinery modules and the software instantly said it was a 6-inch carbon steel pipe that curved at a 90-degree angle in one spot, and gave a display of where the pipe would lay in the five-story tall module.

“We’re building it lasagna-style – layer by layer,” Brackett said. “We fill in one layer at a time. As we go up, the pipe gets bigger.”

Once the steel and pipe are laid for the refinery modules, a small amount of utilities will be added.

Three of the first four modules will be massive. They will be 120 feet long and between 34 and 40 feet tall, but will have steel base transfer beams that add another eight to 10 feet making them around 50 feet tall. The fourth is a corner module and will be smaller, at 54 feet long by 34 feet tall, but will have significantly more piping and valves.

“The [large modules] will end up being 800 to 900 tons with all the product made on site,” work package engineer Jaime Hanson said.

All four will leave on a barge in early November.

“They get off the barge in Port Arthur, go down a ramp and then they’re bolted on” to the existing refinery, Brackett said, adding that the pieces need to be exactly perfect to fit correctly.

Brackett works with two other work package engineers – Hanson and Marc Haas, and virtual plant model administrator Mark Malatesta. The work package engineers each are working on individual modules so if there is a question workers have one person to contact.

A 100-wheel transport vehicle will pick up the modules from where they are built in Brewer, and load them onto the barge for their monthlong trip to the Gulf of Mexico.

“I can’t wait until the first barge goes out and goes under the [Penobscot] Narrows Bridge,” Haas said.

“It will be impressive,” Brackett said.

nricker@bangordailynews.net

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