Koch ready to install massive converter

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This article was published 14/11/2024 (325 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A multimillion-dollar investment by Koch Fertilizer that started nearly two years ago is about to come to completion within the next several days as the company moves forward with the installation of a massive new converter at its Brandon plant.

Two huge cranes currently loom over the site at the plant’s main facility in Brandon’s east end as crews begin the process of installing the replacement converter, referred to as a “tower” by Koch’s plant manager Rodi Sveistrup.

This replacement tower is approximately 98 feet long, 11 feet in diameter and weights approximately 393 metric tons.

The process involves two main steps, Sveistrup said. First, the crews will begin installing the main shell of the tower, which will be lifted by one of two massive cranes from Edmonton that weigh more than 600 tons each. Koch’s chief PR and content strategist, Jessica Robinson, says the cranes themselves are a sight to see.

“The cranes are so large that it took 75 truck loads to move them onsite and will take 10 days to set up,” Robinson wrote in an email to the Sun last week.

The larger crane lifts and positions the shell, while the smaller crane assists and stabilizes the structure. That process is expected to begin this morning and be completed same day. Once completed, the inner cartridge will then be inserted in a similar process within a few days time.

A crew from Mammoet Canada Western is involved with operating the crane, and was also responsible for helping to deliver the tower as well. A second company is doing the actual installation, anchoring of the tower to make sure that it is structurally sound before the crane releases it.

According to Robinson, the total cost of the project is about $35 million. Sveistrup says the investment is a major one for the company, and the community at large.

“It shows our people, and hopefully shows the community that Koch looks at this facility as a long-term kind of partner in the city,” Sveistrup said. “You know, all of these vessels are inspected under recurring frequency, and when we see ones where there’s opportunity to replace them, they become — like this — a major project. And we execute it.”

The converter’s role is to change the composition of a process gas stream using catalysts that cause a reaction, changing the chemical nature of the gas. There are several such towers at the facility, and Sveistrup says they operate in series, all producing different reactions.

“That’s obviously the complexity of the ammonia plant, is that there’s so many different ones,” Sveistrup said.

The process of bringing this project to fruition has been a lengthy one. The two sections of tower were first ordered in 2022, and manufactured by a company in Italy called Casali. About six months ago, the two-piece tower began its journey to North America.

“It was loaded on a barge, shipped overseas, came up through the Great Lakes to the port of Duluth, and that’s where it was transferred — at the port of Duluth — onto a rail car,” Sveistrup said. “And then last week, it was delivered to us by rail car.”

Koch Fertilizer owns its own railway, which runs through the southern part of the property and near the main plant, so the delivery wasn’t a major problem — though it was in the Canadian Pacific rail yard for a few weeks while the crane company got equipment set up.

With the main tower shell being installed and anchored sometime today, it’s expected that it will take another few days to reconfigure the crane boom — the long hydraulic arm attached to the crane cab — before work crews begin installing the inner cartridge. The entire process is expected to be completed by the middle of next week.

The new tower is a replacement of an older tower that will continue to operate well into 2025, even with the construction of the new tower. Sveistrup says the replacement tower won’t go online until next September, so the older tower will remain in operation and be removed sometime down the road.

“We don’t have a timeframe for that,” Sveistrup said. “Generally, you like that redundancy when you have something go online. If there happens to be an issue with it, you could always come back if you require that.”

This massive project follows the construction of a $25-million operation last March, which similarly included the transport and installation of a 175-foot long vessel for its fertilization manufacturing processes.

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.

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