On December 24, the Company’s TA/Revamp Steering Committee held its final meeting in 2024, with a start-up and shutdown schedule chart for the TA/Revamp displayed in the meeting room, clearly marked with, “On December 23, the analysis of the p-xylene product passed the test.”

This marks the successful start-up of all units after the TA/Revamp at FREP in 2024 at the very initial time, completion of process commissioning, and compliance of all products with quality standards.

“I announce that the TA/Revamp is successfully completed. Thank all the participants for their contributions and efforts!” Lin Xu, the Company’s Acting President, announced the successful conclusion of the TA/Revamp on behalf of the TA Steering Committee.

This TA/Revamp lasted for a total of 72 days, involved 70 sets of units and systems, simultaneously implemented 123 capital projects and witnessed over 15,000 contractor employees working on site at the same time during the peak time, and registered over 7.4 million continuous safe man-hours. This has been the most challenging TA/Revamp in the Company’s maintenance history, characterized by tight schedules, heavy tasks, daunting scale, high requirements, and huge need for manpower. For this TA/Revamp, the Company planned ahead and organized meticulously, put into place an institutional framework for the TA/Revamp as early as the end of 2022, prepared a TA Management Manual, and developed an overall start-up and shutdown network for the TA. It adopted a management model featuring “Headquarters + Areas + Discipline Teams” to advance the TA in a coordinated manner. All participating organizations worked closely together to leverage the advantages of ‘large formation’ operations. They planned from a strategic perspective, advanced the TA to high standards and in a high-quality manner, thereby demonstrating the teamwork featuring “One Team, One Goal” through practical actions.

Enhance awareness and strengthen control to maintain the bottom line of safety and environmental protection.

The Company has consolidated safety and environmental protection responsibilities at all levels. Specifically, during the processes of units shutdown, handover for maintenance, and feeding for start-up, it strengthened the interface acceptance inspection and handover for “shutdown, maintenance, and start-up” of the units. It stayed committed to making science-based assessments, pursuing overall optimization, and ensuring stability while seeking progress, thus having ensured that the units could be shut down, well maintained, started smoothly following the maintenance, and operated reliably. During the maintenance process, the requirements for safety management and grid-based control were implemented. Management personnel at all levels conducted on-site inspections on a daily basis, focused on standardization management of construction sites, strengthened process control, promptly stopped and corrected violations, ensured strict safety supervision over direct operation steps, and ensured that over 15,000 maintainers operated safely and achieved “zero incidents, zero injuries.”

Efforts were made to put into place an environmental protection monitoring network, strictly dispose of and control flare, waste gas, noise, and hazardous waste, rigorously implement environmental protection control measures, conduct high-quality chemical cleaning, purging, and replacement, ensure hermetic purging of units, control wastewater indicators at the source during shutdown, and standardize the storage and disposal of solid wastes. During the TA, nearly 2000 atmospheric grid detections were conducted using measures such as environmental monitoring navigation vehicle, and over 500 COD tests were made. Efforts were also made to strictly enforce the requirement of “monitoring before discharging”, to ensure no gas evolution, no oil emission, no noise disturbance or no flying dust”.

Aim at the target and launch a strong fight to win the proactive battle for high-quality maintenance

Since the outbreak of the tough battle of the TA/Revamp, bearing in mind the philosophy that “everything done should be centered around and for the TA and serve the TA, and the TA should be given the top priority”, all participants have won this critical and proactive battle.

Strive for excellence in quality control. To this end, efforts were made to well put into place a three-tier quality management system, strengthen construction quality supervision during the process, implement quality management systems, strictly conduct quality acceptance for maintenance, make moment fastening verification for all key flanges a must, implement the lifetime quality traceability system and exercise “zero tolerance” to quality problems, thus achieving a 100% acceptance qualification rate for maintenance items and a 100% qualification rate for the first handover of units.

Coordinate quality and efficiency to keep progress well on track. To this end, the TA/Revamp Headquarters conducted operations against the operation map and advanced progress on schedule, with the focus placed on the general orientation and key projects. Utilizing the P6 system, it tracked the progress in each area on a daily basis, promoted maintenance based on digitization and informatization. When bottlenecks in key links were discovered, the best resources would be mobilized to tackle them to ensure that critical paths and main control points were completed on time. 

Efforts were also made to implement precise management to control costs, strictly manage the scope of maintenance, strictly and carefully review quantities, and manage expense settlements. Projects that require additional funding must be approved by the TA Steering Committee, to strengthening cost control awareness and improve the capital allocation and usage efficiency.

Enhance supervision to ensure integrity. To this end, efforts were made to conduct integrity education for all personnel before the maintenance, appoint special supervisors from contractors, and establish a direct reporting mechanism to give play to the role of both “probes” and “bridges”. In addition, a total of 118 integrity risk points in the TA/Revamp were sorted out, prevention and control measures were developed to include them in the scope of regular supervision and inspection. Process audit and supervision were carried out, with the audit process front-loaded. The approach to addressing both symptoms and root causes was further adopted to promote the integration of supervision, rectification, and management, and achieve “High-quality projects and honest personnel”.

Since October 8, all participating organizations have united as one and gone all out to ensure safety, quality, and progress to the best of their ability with their best resources, thereby successfully completing maintenance tasks in a high-quality manner, clearing obstacles for the safe and stable operation of units in the next operation cycle, and laying a foundation for further development of the Company”, said Yang Pengfei, Commander of the TA/Revamp and General Manager of Mechanical Department.

Highlight the leadership of Party building, allowing the Party flag to fly high at the front line of TA

Taking the TA/Revamp as the main battlefield for advancing the campaign themed on “keeping in mind the instructions, forging ahead with gratitude and promoting innovation-led development to build the first-class”, The Company’s Party Committee has developed the competition for making contributions featuring “Competitions in Terms of Safety, Quality, Progress, Collaboration, Thrift and Civility to Ensure Safe, Environmental-Friendly, High-Quality, Efficient and Punctual Completion of the TA” to inspire enthusiasm for work. Party organizations at all levels formed Party Member Commando and Youth Commandos, engaging leaders and employees to take on heavy responsibilities and achieve significant accomplishments during the “Major Battle” of the TA/Revamp.

Party organizations at all levels established Party Member Commandos and Party Member Problem-Solving Teams, played the roles of Party member demonstration positions, leveraged Party member responsibility areas and Party member safety supervision posts to address priorities and difficulties such as energy conservation and emissions reduction during the TA, “zero emissions” for material retreat and purging, unit maintenance and revamping, as well as field housekeeping.

Party branches of Aromatics BT, Olefins BT, etc., worked together with TA contractors under the mechanism featuring “Joint Construction, Joint Consultation and Joint Management” to promote the two-way integration of Party building and the maintenance activities. The Party branches of Fuels-2 BT, PO BT, and Utilities BT gave play to the role of “Party Member Responsibility Zone, Party Member Vanguard Post, and Party Member Demonstration Post”, linking points to lines, and connecting lines to form a network, with Party members leading the way to inspire all. Youth League general branches of Process Department and Mechanical Department engaged young employees to form Youth Commandos, demonstrating the character of the Youth League featuring “the direction the Party flag points to is where the youth league members will be heading for.

Functional departments organized a service team for the TA/Revamp to provide catering, accommodation, transportation and other service guarantees based on TA activities, and held childcare classes for the children of participating employees to make them worry-free; during the critical period of the TA, concentrated visits were made to contractors, and “Maintenance Energy Packs” were distributed to employees, conveying the care of the Party committee of the Company to every participating employee, thereby enhancing their cohesion and morale.

(Media Group for the TA/Revamp)