Joint-Venture Team Delivers Grey Market Gas Turbine Ahead of Schedule

Who wouldn’t put on a hard hat and raise a hand for a project in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies? But what about two harsh winters (-40 degrees Celsius and Fahrenheit), snow drifts and a summer of record rainfall?

Black & Veatch with PCL Industrial Management, under the joint venture name of BPC Milner, persevered through extreme weather conditions to deliver the Milner Unit 2 Simple Cycle ahead of schedule — in just 17 months. This engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) team installed a 200 MW grey market GE 7FA.05 gas turbine generator adjacent to Maxim’s HR Milner Unit 1 Generating Plant in a remote location 450 kilometers (280 miles) west of Edmonton, Alberta.

“We battled the weather all the way through this project and finished strong under the spectre of a global pandemic, with safety, productivity and delivering a quality project top-of-mind. It was a pleasure to work alongside the BPC team and hit COD on-budget and on-time,” said Bob Emmott, COO Maxim Power Corp.

An additional schedule challenge involved the grey market turbine. In this case, grey market meant eight years of storage in the Northern United States before delivery. After shipment to the job site, BPC (B&V and PCL) inspected and inventory-crated hundreds of boxes, working with the owner and GE to replace damaged or outdated components. Next, the turbine package had to be conformed to Canadian standards and local environmental conditions, coordinating closely with the owner’s team and local authorities in an expedited manner to ensure the machine could obtain a permit to operate.

The BPC and Milner teams implemented onsite COVID-19 safety measures of social distancing, wearing masks and additional sanitizing of office trailers and breakrooms quickly and effectively without disrupting the project schedule or productivity.

“Black & Veatch and PCL’s joint venture history allowed our teams to be agile and proactively respond to the owner’s evolving requirements and challenges,” said Ali Assaf, Associate Vice President for Black & Veatch’s power business.

With the success of this project, the owner is now looking to BPC for the next phase, which entails a grey market heat recovery steam generator (HRSG) installation to repower the Milner Unit 1 steam turbine generator. This new combined cycle arrangement will increase the plant’s overall efficiency and generation output to approximately 300 MW.