MEGlobal BOOKRAMEG Project
Freeport, Texas
Best Project

Owner: MEGlobal
Lead Design Firm/General Contractor: Worley
Mechanical Contractor (equipment/steel/piping): Fluor Corp.

Best practices in construction planning, combined with added efficiencies, helped the team on MEGlobal Inc.’s BOOKKRAMEG ethylene glycol facility complete the complex project with significant time and cost savings.

The facility is a 750,000-metric-ton-per-year monoethylene glycol (MEG) and diethylene glycol (DEG) plant, and BOOKRAMEG means “future MEG.” The project included the ethylene glycol processing unit, a main office building, a utilities area, offsite pipelines and sitewide IT development and integration.

Worley acted as construction manager and was responsible for all engineering and procurement, while Fluor was mechanical contractor and handled most of the field construction.

The project experienced scheduling challenges related to equipment and material delivery. Worley and Fluor worked with MEGlobal to change the sequence of work and, in some cases, transferred work from other contractors to Fluor. The team was able to complete construction in 21 months—eight months faster than the industry average and three months faster than the historic best, achieved in 1988.

Pipe productivity on the project likely saved more than $60 million compared with market averages. The MEGlobal project saw 4.5 work hours per linear ft of pipe compared with the current industry average of 10 work hours for each linear ft of large bore, heavy wall pipe. Projects comparable to MEGlobal had an average of 6.8 work hours per linear ft of pipe.

Of the 80,000 welds for the project, there were only four rejects, making the project’s weld reject rate 0.23% compared with the current U.S. Gulf Coast average of ~5%. The project contains more than 250,000 linear ft of heavy-wall, high-alloy pipe with an average diameter of 8 in.

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