Mammoth vessel arrives at Brandon’s Koch plant

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This article was published 30/03/2024 (735 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Brandon received an unusual visitor early Thursday morning, but the police escort and transport convoy that ushered it into city limits were not for a VIP but an important new component for an east end industrial facility.

It took 11 days and three semi-trucks to transport a 175-foot-long vessel weighing 260,000 pounds from Edmonton to Brandon’s Koch Fertilizer plant. It arrived Thursday around 4 a.m.

However, its arrival only heralded the beginning of work for the approximately 280 staff who work there, according to plant manager Rodi Sveistrup.

“A vessel of this magnitude and this effort is relatively rare,” Sveistrup said in a Thursday interview.

“If you look at the infrastructure that it takes to make the products that we do, there are a lot of vessels similar to this, but the frequency that they’re replaced is not such that you’re doing this every year.”

It arrived at a weigh scale south of Brandon on Wednesday afternoon, but the convoy waited until the wee hours to haul it north on Highway 10 and then northeast on Highway 110 so that traffic disruptions would be minimized as the vessel travelled the last leg to the plant.

Along the way, pilot vehicles and representatives from utility companies helped the convoy navigate obstacles like low power lines. The main convoy features 10 people from Mammoet Canada Western, but up to 35 people were part of the group during police and utility escorts.

The vessel will be used as part of the ammonia manufacturing process at the plant once it is set up.

The plant’s primary operation since it opened in the mid-1960s has been to make ammonia, a form of nitrogen fertilizer. It also further refines ammonia into other forms like urea and UAN, a mixture of urea and ammonium nitrate.

Four temporary cranes were erected at the plant to lift the vessel into place. The main crane weighs 660 tons by itself, with the tailing crane slightly smaller at 620 tons.

It was going to take several hours to hoist the vessel into position and then anchor it onto its foundation. That work was scheduled for Thursday but delayed due to some technical issues.

But because of the work needed to hook the vessel into the plant’s network of pipes and finish installation as well as the need to wait for a service outage to finish setup, it and another, smaller vessel arriving in either June or July are not scheduled to go online until mid-2025.

These outages happen every two to four years to allow for maintenance. The upgrade plant that produces urea and UAN had an outage for maintenance work late last fall.

“There’s about a $25-million investment when all is said and done when you take the manufacturing of this vessel, the freight, the installation and the connection to our process,” said Sveistrup, who has worked at the plant for 23 years.

“I think it’s a good indicator to our employees as well as to the community that shows that we feel this is a long-term opportunity here in Brandon.”

The company also recently celebrated its Brandon plant receiving Energy Star certification from Natural Resources Canada, its only facility in Canada to receive the designation. That means that it is in the top 25 per cent when it comes to energy efficiency among facilities of its type.

Koch has two other plants in the U.S. that have received Energy Star certification from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Sveistrup said that was accomplished through cooling upgrades that help the plant reduce electricity use in the winter months and reduce steam use in the summer.

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