IDESA commissioned Sarens to perform lifting and installation operation at the GALP Energia's Sines refinery in Portugal.

With a distilling capacity of 10.9 million tonnes a year, or 220,000 barrels a day, the Sines refinery is one of the largest in Europe. The Sines refinery began operating in 1978. Covering an area of 320 hectares, the Sines refinery has a storage capacity of 3 million m³, of which 1.5 million m³ is crude oil, and the remainder includes final and intermediate products such as gas, gasoline, diesel, and so on. The refinery comprises of 34 processing units.

There was a limited room for installing our equipment and was very challenging to bring them inside the refinery. The time schedule was tight as always and the client asked for a crawler crane of a minimum 1000T capacity. 

Our team studied the job location, space constraints, safety concerns, and client's requirement. The team deployed:

• CC6800 SWSL
• 2x6 SPMTs
• 3x60T Strand jacks

The equipment was transported from the Headquarters by ship followed by trucks in approximately two weeks and was rigged in ten days. It was a challenging task to get the equipment inside the refinery. 

The crew replaced the new reactor pieces in the generator and installed a cat cooler. The parts weighed upto 105T and 100m in dimension. They were lifted at a maximum radius of 25.3m. There was a limited time available for lifting during and outage of the refinery. A total number of nine picks were executed at site to complete the operation.