CB&I New Castle in New Castle, Del. was awarded the 2023 STI/SPFA ASME Pressure Vessel of the Year for the Liquid Hydrogen/Gateway Project project.
We had an opportunity to speak further with Adam French, Project Manager at CB&I, about the vessel.
Hello, my name is Adam French, and I was the CB&I project manager for the two 500,000-gallon LH-2 spheres for the plug power green energy hydrogen project.
This project was built just outside of Buffalo in Alabama, N.Y. And I just want to first thank the committee for selecting our project for this year’s tank of the year award.
This was a great project for CB&I. Zero incidents, ahead of schedule, great team, great client – a true recipe for success.
This was a turnkey EPFC project for CB&I. These are double wall liquid hydrogen spheres, carbon steel outer, stainless steel inner, and vacuum insulated with perlite. Each sphere is compliant to Section VIII, Division 1.
CB&I scope included the foundations, the structure, the nozzles, platforms, the access stairway, coatings, and testing.
This was a unique project in many ways for CB&I compared to our standard product lines, particularly with the sequence of the execution. We had an excellent engineering design team and construction technology team based out of our office in Plainfield, Ill. They worked closely with our operations team, just to make sure we had a successful plan for execution.
We actually built the spheres in some assembly, so you can see from some of the photos, our intent and execution plan was to minimize the work at heights for safety reasons, and also for productivity.
We have two videos, that show just all the hard work that the team put together. These are videos of the inner sphere lifts, the subassemblies, and just the amount of hours and planning and detailing that went into the execution. The execution of these lifts was just amazing, was just phenomenal.
One of the challenges, you can see from the next slides, is the weather in Buffalo, N.Y. You can see, the summers were great, but the winters, we had a lot of snow days, a lot of whiteout. So the crew worked diligently, on several mornings, to clear the snow, to clear the areas so that they could continue work.
Once the spheres were complete, then we applied a Carboline coating system. Turned over the spheres to the client.
And then lastly, CB&I, we could not have been successful without the men and women in the field dedicated just to the safety for themselves, the safety to the client, other contractors in the area, and to the community, and also for providing a quality product built to the high standards.
Thank you.
