Who You Gonna Call When Primary Cooling Fails?

In July 2002, when a primary cooling tower at Shell Chemical's Deer Park, Texas, facility needed to be shut down for repairs, the plant operators turned to Aggreko for a quick and effective solution. Aggreko responded with a system that provided the plant with valuable time and cost savings.

The large cooling tower was used to in conjunction with process heat exchangers to provide process temperature control. Aggreko's Industrial Cooling Tower Center used 30 of its modular cooling towers, processing 80,000 gallons per minute (gpm) at the site. Aggreko provided and installed the cooling towers, ran PVC piping and supplied electrical work and pumps to the plant.

In addition to the modular towers, Aggreko provided two 2,500 kilovolt-amperes (kV-amp) transformers and four 1,200-amp (A) load centers.

After installing the equipment, Aggreko worked with the company on an ongoing basis to make the multiple-stage project successful. The cooling equipment Aggreko supplied was on-site for a month; cooling water was circulating at the plant within 19 days of equipment installation, and the chemical units were fully operational after an additional 12 days.

"As the largest utility rental service, we could provide more equipment and expertise than anyone else could supply alone," explained Billy Childers, Aggreko's Industrial Cooling Tower Center's national manager. "We offered the company a modular system that could be tailored to fit any size application. Other companies could not have done that."

The Aggreko Industrial Cooling Tower Center team has more than 40 combined years of cooling tower experience. The equipment was able to save the chemical manufacturer extremely valuable production time, reducing the downtime from months to days.