What a Turnaround Is and the Kinds of Planned Outage
The meaning of turnaround, shutdown and outage, the kinds of planned outage, and what this course does and does not qualify you to do.
10 min
Activities: 0 of 3
A refinery, a petrochemical plant or a gas plant is built to run day and night for years. Some work cannot be done while it runs. Nobody can enter a reactor that is full of hot hydrocarbon. Nobody can inspect the inside of a distillation column under pressure. So, at intervals, the owner stops the plant on purpose, makes it safe, opens it, does the work and starts it again.
This event is called a turnaround. A turnaround is a planned stop of a whole plant or of one or more process units, with a fixed scope of inspection, maintenance, cleaning and project work, done in a fixed window of time. Many sites write it as TAR or TA. Other sites say shutdown or outage for the same event. Some companies group the words together as shutdowns, turnarounds and outages (STO).
Kinds of outage you will hear about
The whole plant, or a large block of units, is stopped. Equipment is opened, inspected and repaired. This is the largest event. The interval between major turnarounds is often several years. The site sets it from inspection rules, equipment condition and business need.
How a turnaround differs from routine maintenance
- The plant state changes. Units are shut down, emptied, cleaned, opened, closed and started again. Each change of state has its own hazards.
- The volume is very large. Work that would fill several years of routine maintenance is done in a few weeks.
- The workforce multiplies. Contractor workers who do not know the site arrive in large numbers.
- The window is fixed. Every extra day without production costs money, so time pressure is constant.
- Much of the work is not routine. Some tasks are done only once in several years, so few people have recent experience of them.
Match the term to its meaning
Match each term on the left with the description on the right.
- Major turnaround
- Unit shutdown
- Short planned outage
- Opportunity work
Which statement best describes a turnaround?