Milestone Moments: Technicians Prepare to Support Production in Central Maintenance Building

The Central Maintenance Building is a major step in the construction process, bringing the site closer to start up. Kenric Taylor, Central Maintenance Manager, excitedly shares about the experience, “It’s beginning to feel like we’re transitioning from a project site to a running asset site.”

While the plant was in the design phase, the Shell Polymers team really wanted to make sure there was a single, high-quality location for all things maintenance. In this Central Maintenance Building, the administrative area will be on the top level, while the main area on the bottom floor connects to the warehouse and technician shops. The teams that work here will primarily support production, by doing both reactive and proactive maintenance activities. In this space, experienced technicians will be equipped with modern tools to ensure the plant is able to provide its customers with confident PE supply. It’s truly the one-stop place for any maintenance need.

In the two weeks since the building was handed over to maintenance teams, over 250 pallets of supplies have been delivered for the technicians to excitedly sort through. The maintenance technicians have been hard at work opening up the pallets, seeing what we ordered, and sorting through them.

For the staff, it’s been a surreal experience to now physically touch and see all the new furniture, gear, and supplies they’ve spent two-and-a-half years planning. Weston Turner, Maintenance Engineer, shared about the experience, “The shop is a crazy exciting milestone, as is the Central Maintenance Building. We actually get to put our hands on all the stuff we’ve been buying. We get to touch it. We get to see it. It’s monumental.”

With the Central Maintenance Building completed and the equipment turned over, this is just another step in the start up process towards providing a reliable PE supply to plastics converters. With this building supporting plant production, we’re one step closer to being the supplier of choice for converters for years to come. Reliability Engineer, Kate Justin, says it well: “It feels really good to be moving forward, one step closer to the plant being ours, to starting up, to being an unrivaled polyethylene producer.”