North West Redwater Sturgeon Refinery

Client: North West Redwater (NWR) Partnership

Location: Redwater, Alberta, Canada

Business Segment: Energy Solutions

Industry: Fuels

Services: FabricationEngineering and DesignProcurementConstruction

Map showing the location of North West Redwater Sturgeon Refinery

Executive Summary

The North West Redwater Sturgeon Refinery was the first such refinery built in Canada in over 30 years. Fluor provided front end engineering, detailed engineering, procurement, fabrication, construction and pre-commissioning for three units of the North West Redwater Sturgeon Refinery. These units are: Unit 10 (Crude and Vacuum), Unit 20 (LC Finer) and Unit 30 (Hydroprocessing). The client was the North West Redwater Partnership (NWR), a joint venture comprising two Calgary based companies: North West Refining, Inc. and Canadian Natural Upgrading Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Canadian Natural Resources Limited.

Client's Challenge

NWR was building the first phase of a bitumen refinery to process 79,000 barrels per day (BPD) of bitumen + diluent blend (50,000 BPD of bitumen), in order to produce low-carbon, high-value end products needed by Albertans and global markets.

The facility is owned, managed and operated by NWR, with bitumen feedstock provided by Canadian Natural Resources Limited as well as the Government of Alberta through its bitumen royalty-in-kind initiative.

NWR was committed to creating opportunity by adding value to the province's resources and ensuring the best possible return on investment, as well as Building it SAFE, Building it RIGHT, in the Heartland of Alberta.

Fluor's Solution

We worked closely with NWR during front-end engineering to find solutions to reduce cost. This included a highly modularized design and innovative engineering, which resulted in significant work hours being shifted from site to the Edmonton area module yards.

Front-end engineering began in 2011. Detailed engineering started in 2013 after a cost savings initiative phase and completed in 2015. In 2015, assembly of the project's 358 total modules began, 114 of which were assembled by a Fluor joint venture's fabrication facility in Edmonton.

As part of this project, we executed the largest lift in Canadian history with the successful raising of the 1,530-ton cracking reactor. The lift was the fourth largest in Fluor's history of more than a century. This was our largest construction project in Canada, with over five million craft hours to be worked at the job site. The scope of the project included over 16,000 tons of steel, 177,000 linear meters of pipe and 670,000 linear meters of cable. Self-perform construction included structural steel, piping and electrical and instrumentation for units 10 and 30. Peak site presence was expected to be around 2,000 people, including craft and staff. Construction innovations included the use of CEMATRIX™ for optimized backfill, incorporation of engineered scaffolding systems (PERI) into the 3D model and full implementation of advanced workface planning, setting a new standard for Fluor.

Conclusion

This project was the first refinery built in Canada in 30 years.

Fluor was named a Celebration of Engineering and Technology Innovation (CETI) Award winner for our innovative integrated scaffolding solution used on the project. We received the award in the Scenario-Based Project Planning category.