Planning for a Safe Maintenance Turnaround
At ARC, no matter what job we are undertaking – it all starts with safety, our number one priority.
Each year, we undertake major maintenance projects as part of our annual turnaround season to proactively maintain our world-class assets, and responsibly develop the energy the world needs. These planned shutdowns temporarily pause production so that we can perform preventative repairs, and upgrades on essential equipment. The annual program is one of our biggest operational initiatives and requires the expertise of many employees and contractors to execute it safely and efficiently.
Planning & Execution
Completing major maintenance and facility upgrades during facility turnarounds requires months of preparation to formulate a plan of action, secure materials, and line up third-party service providers to assist with specialty tasks. Planning kicks off nearly a year in advance and begins with our field operations team, lead operators, and foremen coming together to establish a turnaround game plan that outlines the types of work to be completed, equipment required, service provider expectations and qualifications, as well as instructions on how to safely conduct work while operations continue concurrently.
Long-range planning ensures we effectively allocate resources and affords us the opportunity to time our turnaround activities to coincide with other pipeline outages or plant maintenance to minimize the disruption of taking our facilities offline.
Turnarounds involve many different activities occurring at the same time, and safely completing the work requires coordination and ongoing communications between our teams and contractors to ensure everyone is informed and aligned. We take the safety of everyone on our sites very seriously and provide onsite supervision during high-risk jobs throughout the turnaround to safeguard against harm and make sure that our Life Saving Rules are being followed to help prevent serious injuries.
2022 In Review
In 2022, we successfully completed the largest turnaround season in our Company’s history, finishing all projects under budget and ahead of schedule. Through detailed planning and safe execution, we performed 21 turnarounds across our northeast BC and Alberta fields, including our largest facility turnaround ever at our Dawson III & IV facilities.
2022 Turnaround By-the-Numbers
- Approximately 101,500 working hours
- 85 days
- ~$21 million investment
- Zero lost-time incidents
Looking Ahead
Our large network of natural gas and liquids processing facilities, water handling infrastructure, and pipelines, allow us to safely produce low-cost crude oil, natural gas, and NGLs. Operating and maintaining these complex facilities requires many skilled employees and contractors and annual turnarounds help us to keep our business running safely and reliably.
As we head into turnaround season for 2023, our teams are once again beginning to undertake several significant maintenance projects. By applying lessons learned from previous years, enhancing communications from leaders and among teams, and strengthening collaboration and teamwork between all our employees and contracts taking part in turnaround activities – we are taking proactive measures to ensure we complete another successful turnaround season while keeping everyone at our sites safe.
Thank you to all of our permanent, temporary, and contract workers, as well as our many service providers and suppliers for continued support in our pursuit of operational excellence.
