IPP East Coast, a member of the IPP Group of Companies, has provided replacement boiler tubes to save an unscheduled sulphuric acid plant outage in Mt Isa, Australia.
The plant was forced into an unscheduled outage due to a failure in one of the main boilers. The plant cannot operate without the boiler, necessitating a total shutdown of the plant. In addition, the loss of acid supply caused the downstream operations at the ammonium phosphate plant at Phosphate Hill, south of Mt Isa, to operate at significantly reduced rates. The sulphuric acid plant would need to be offline for a period of 4-6 weeks in order to complete the necessary repairs, and the financial implications of loss of production and repairs running into the tens of millions of dollars.
To aid in the recovery plan IPP East Coast contracted a tube mill in Europe to produce 800 replacement boiler tubes within seven days, a total of 36tns of steel tubes. True to their word the tubes were completed within six days and collected on the 7th day.
To achieve the fastest possible delivery to Mt Isa from Europe IPP chartered a 50-metre Russian Ilyushin IL-76 cargo plane.
Kevin Bedford, Director at IPP East Coast said “Landing the tubes in Mt Isa within 2 weeks of implementing the recovery plan, exceeded everyone’s expectations, in particular our Client. A few sleepless nights involved, but a great team effort to pull everything together –and an adventure in the memory bank for a long time to come”.
