CalPlant Challenges – Environmental
PROFESSIONAL CONSTRUCTION MANAGEMENT – A CASE STUDY
Project Owners benefit greatly by having a skilled Construction Professional on their team, providing valuable guidance and services needed in today’s sophisticated construction arena. Industrial Projects Construction (IPC) was the Construction Manager on a greenfield Medium Density Fiberboard project in Willows, CA.
We will discuss some challenges that came with designing and installing a serial number one process industry plant. We all know it takes a great team, and we had one. But what did that team of engineers and contractors specifically do that was compelling? Let’s dig into that a bit. But first some background.
CALPLANT’S GENESIS
California’s Sacramento Valley is the second-largest rice-growing region in the US, planting over 500,000 acres annually. In 1991 the California Air Resources Board passed legislation phasing out field burning of rice fields. Current practices require the straw to be tilled under followed by an additional field flooding to facilitate straw decomposition. This greatly increases machinery, labor, water demand, fuel costs and greenhouse gases without an increase in crop yields.
CalAg, LLC (“CalPlant”) was founded in 1996 to address issues resulting from the burn ban. Years of experimentation, product trials, and committed efforts confirmed that Medium Density Fiberboard (“MDF”) was an excellent use for the straw.
PROJECT DETAILS
The CalPlant project is the first MDF plant in the world utilizing rice straw as the furnish material. The plant was designed to produce more than 150 million square feet of MDF annually (¾” basis) using 280,000 tons of rice straw.
The process design was developed in Germany by Siempelkamp Maschinen- und Anlagenbau GmbH (“Siempelkamp”). The Siempelkamp ContiRoll® Generation 9 continuous press employs a product mat 10-feet wide and 117 feet long. The mill produces MDF thicknesses of 2.0 mm to 32 mm (0.080” to 1.25″). The state-of- the-art press is currently the only one of its type in the United States.
Industrial Projects Consulting, LLC (“IPC”) was the Project/Construction Manager. All major contracts for engineering, vendor supply and construction were solicited, procured, and managed by IPC. IPC oversaw all the design professionals, their scopes of work, schedules, quality, and contracts. We managed site safety, with the added Covid-19 global pandemic as an unexpected challenge.
The Balance of Plant engineering design was prepared in Eugene, OR by Evergreen Engineering, Inc.
The project site is 273 acres, with 25 acres for the plant itself. The balance of land is designed to store 330,000 tons of baled rice straw feedstock which is harvested in a six-week period in the fall of the year.
Detail design began in the Fall 2017, and ground was broken for the site and civil packages in the Spring of 2018. Detailed design for structural, mechanical, electrical, controls, and specialty packages was prepared in parallel to site construction. Commercial operation began in Spring 2021. Eureka™ MDF meets or exceeds the American National Standards Institute (“ANSI”) performance standards for traditional wood based MDF with excellent machinability, paintability, and consistency. Its annually renewable fiber source ensures a steady, homogenous supply of Eureka™ MDF.
Our team faced all the normal design and construction issues for a complex, heavy industry plant design, but these expanded to a never-ending compilation of obstacles. Some of the most notable, and listed below, were the weather and environmental impacts from 2018-2020.
WEATHER & ENVIRONMENTAL
All projects suffer weather and environmental challenges, but our project was particularly affected.
Plant Site Flooding: 2019 was extraordinarily wet with flood events in northern California resulting from severe rainstorms causing site-wide flooding. The runoff resulted in a breach of a nearby canal thus flooding our site. Equipment was unable to move and materials were occasionally lost in the mud.
The project years of 2018 and 2020 were the worst fire seasons on record. The northern Sacramento valley was often smoke filled, with low smoke ceilings, at times obscuring the tops of cranes. This caused severe health and safety issues with the construction staff, necessitating close monitoring and implementation of safety-related work stoppages and slowdowns. CalPlant was directly impacted by several fires:
- Camp Fire, November 2018: This fire was 30 miles away, was in the top 25 of largest California fires, and burned the entire town of Paradise, consumed 153,300 acres, with a loss of 18,800 structures and 85 deaths. Several CalPlant personnel lost their homes. Available local rental property for craft workers all but vanished because of the number of refugees from the fire zone.
- The LNU Lightning storm of August 2020 started the largest fire on record in California, ultimately burning over 1.10MM acres, and was 10 miles from our site. This storm was responsible for igniting one of our straw stacks, which measure approximately 600 ft long, 60 ft wide, by 33 ft tall. By the end of this on-site fire, CalPlant had lost 18 straw stacks, 15% of their inventory, and was left to deal with the aftermath throughout the remainder of the project. Many CalPlant staff were fully engaged in remediation of damage and cleanup from the fire for several weeks afterwards and unavailable for ongoing startup and commissioning activities.
IPC worked diligently to ensure all firefighting systems were fully operational and capable of preventing the spread of this fire into our plant equipment and buildings. Close coordination with plant maintenance teams resulted in continued fire water flows for several weeks from the start of the straw pile fires.
AND IN THE END…
The story of this project is one of perseverance. The project founders stuck with the project twenty-five years from inception to completion. The technical challenges attendant with the design and construction of a project of this size, complexity, and location were compelling.
Every one of these problems were faced and overcome because of the determination of the project leadership, and the dedicated efforts of a group of stakeholders on two continents who believed in this project and refused to accept anything but total success.
Industrial Projects Consulting thanks them and are proud to have worked beside them.
Author – Carry Redmond
Cary has over 40 years of experience in the consulting engineering and construction industries, principally in the industrial sectors. He has worked in the field and office performing detailed design, engineering management, project management, and construction management. His emphasis is on capital project execution and building the teams to execute those projects with high levels of quality and service.
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