Much more than a plan

Boats moored for safety at the Port of Beaumont thrash wildly as Hurricane Ike roars ashore. A ship captain estimated waters rose 11 feet at the port, almost lifting vessels onto their docks.

Last year’s hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico left scars on the coast and affected chemical markets worldwide, but lessons learned from earlier storms helped ExxonMobil employees respond much faster this time around.

Call it a worst-case scenario. A major hurricane fills the Gulf of Mexico and lands on the most heavily industrialized stretch of the upper Texas coast. ExxonMobil’s Houston offices lose power, and several of the company’s manufacturing sites are damaged. Specialty products — some supporting global supply networks — are suddenly unavailable to customers in the Americas, Europe and Asia.

Although it’s the kind of emergency that ExxonMobil employees plan and practice for each year, only similar experiences following the violent Gulf storms of 2005 could fully prepare them for the hurricanes of 2008.

“We prepare for this, but it was difficult to anticipate the extent of damage caused by Hurricane Ike,” says Will Cirioli, ExxonMobil Chemical Company regional director, Americas, who also heads the company’s Emergency Support Group (ESG).

“One enhancement we made to our emergency-response plan after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 was to add a regional response team that can quickly relocate our headquarters operations from Houston to Dallas,” he says. “Hurricane Ike was the first time we had to put that plan in motion.”

A measured response
The goal of ExxonMobil’s hurricane-response plan is to secure facilities, protect the public, make sure employees are safe, and continue serving customers. The response is measured, following plans that are made well in advance.

“This is not a situation that you make up as you go,” Cirioli explains. “We make our decisions long before there’s a threat. When hurricanes do threaten, our response is pre-programmed, based on a series of triggers that are dictated by the storm.”

ExxonMobil operates many oil and gas facilities, four large refineries, two lube-oil blending plants and nine major chemical-manufacturing sites along the coast from Texas to Florida. Some facilities can be shut down in as little as 12 hours, but others take two or three days, so the moment a tropical storm or hurricane threatens the Gulf of Mexico, the ESG begins communicating with all the sites and monitoring the weather several times a day.

By Tuesday, September 9, there was enough certainty in the forecast that Cirioli moved Chemical’s ESG to Dallas. Other Houston-based ExxonMobil companies did the same, joining forces with ExxonMobil’s Regional Response Team, sharing office space that is kept ready year-round with all the computers, supplies and phone lines needed to run the global business.

As Ike grew in size and continued toward the Texas-Louisiana coast, it triggered the next stages of the emergency-response plan. Generators, food, water, radios and all the other equipment needed during recovery were pre-positioned so they could be trucked in quickly once the storm passed. On Wednesday, plants started shutting down. By noon Friday, the ones nearest Houston were bracing for the worst.

Landfall
Early Saturday morning, the center of Ike surged through Galveston Bay and up the Houston Ship Channel. By dawn, more than 90 percent of the region was without power. Historic Galveston and communities all along the coast sustained widespread damage. The Beaumont Chemical Plant, on what’s called the “wet side” of the storm, was impacted with more than 11 feet of storm surge.

“When people saw the damage here, they thought we would be down for years,” says Dick Townsend, Beaumont Chemical Plant manager. “By Saturday afternoon, we had a small group of workers inside, making sure there were no leaks or spills. Damage assessment crews moved in the following day.”

Almost every part of the plant was damaged, and anything electrical that was lower than 10 feet from the ground was destroyed.

“We had to replace approximately 5,000 instruments, 2,000 valves, 800 pumps, 700 motors, 650 junction boxes, 500 online analyzers, 45 air conditioners and 25 switch-gear buildings,” Townsend says. “We removed 13 million pounds of debris and used more than 300 generators for temporary power while we were doing all the work.”

Business continuity
“The Beaumont Chemical Plant is a critical supplier of polyalpha olefins,” says John Lyon, Synthetics vice president. “PAOs are the basestock that our customers use to blend high-quality lubricants for heavy machinery, such as the gearboxes of the giant wind turbines used to generate electricity. The plant also produces synthetic basestock used in Mobil 1.”

A nonstop effort by the various emergency groups and regional response members in Dallas managed the recovery, held supply networks together and advised global customers on what to expect. The companies that blend and market synthetic lubricants routinely keep some amount of basestock in reserve, but would they have enough to last until the Beaumont plant was back on stream?

“Given the inventory levels of some of our lubes manufacturing customers,” Lyon says, “we began allocating our own inventory and working with them to develop options to maintain supplies to their customers.”

As many as 2,000 people worked in shifts around the clock to repair the Specialties units at the Beaumont Chemical Plant.

“The storm hit in mid-September,” Lyon recalls, “and by early December both the Synthetics and the Catalyst units at the chemical plant were back on line. We began increasing allocations, and by mid-January, we were back to 100 percent.”

Efficient manufacturing
Once the Synthetics and Catalyst units were running again, they performed extremely reliably, and that helped increase inventories faster than anyone expected.

“In most cases, we replaced damaged equipment with newer and more efficient technology,” Townsend says. “Our goal was to come back strong, and we did. At least in terms of the electrical system, we have a brand new plant.”