POWER August 2010 - 39

2010 MARMADUKE AWARD
4. Piling petcoke. Petcoke from Gulf Coast refineries is delivered to the unloading station
via barge. The petcoke is then unloaded via crane onto a conveyor to begin a 1.5-mile journey to
the plant. Courtesy: The Shaw Group
to Bruce Davis, senior vice president of
Shaw's Power Group and Shaw's project
executive, both Cleco and Shaw tried to
buy locally whenever practical.
The project was run " open book " be5.
Efficiently moving coal. A 1.5-mile pipe conveyor, built to transport solid fuel from the
dock facility to the coal crusher house, is the longest for this type of application in the U.S. Cleco
estimates the new unit will move about 1.5 million tons of petcoke delivered by barge each year.
The 1,500 tph conveyor belt is 500 mm in diameter and can run at grade for long distances and
then elevate, as required. Courtesy: Dearborn Mid-West Conveyor Co.
fore the final terms and costs were determined.
Shaw, after selection by Cleco in
2005, developed a baseline scope of work
and target pricing estimates for the project.
Open book meant that Cleco had complete
access to the pricing estimates for
materials, labor, and subcontracts. Shaw
and Cleco then worked as a team to meet
with vendors of key engineered equipment
to make final purchase selections, negotiate
terms, and finalize the scope of supply.
With the terms and conditions of these
major purchases agreed to by Cleco, Shaw
was then able to build a lump sum turnkey
price-essentially updating the target
estimate with hard numbers that included
the performance and schedule guarantees
and warrantees. When the final EPC contract
terms were set in May 2006, Cleco
gave Shaw the notice to start construction.
Shaw then assumed the more typical EPC
responsibilities and was paid based on an
agreed upon schedule of values.
Moving Fuel and By-Products
Smoothly
Petcoke deliveries to Madison Unit 3 are
barged along Louisiana's Mississippi and
Red Rivers from refineries in south Louisiana.
After a barge reaches Cleco's bargeunloading
facility, the fuel is moved overland
to the plant site (Figure 4). " We barge up
waterways to an unloading facility, drop the
petcoke onto a mile-and-a-half-long conveyor
and deliver directly to the facility, " says
Fontenot. That's factually correct, but he understates
the enormity of the task. In fact, the
1.5-mile pipe conveyor built to transport solid
fuel from the dock facility to the coal crusher
house is the longest for this type of application
in the U.S. Cleco estimates the new unit
will move about 1.5 million tons of petcoke
and an additional 600,000 tons of limestone
delivered by barge each year.
The conveyer's route does not follow a
Shaw performed a merit shop where direct
hire labor and subcontractors that offered the
best value were selected. Shaw reports that
90% of the work was performed with Shaw
direct hire labor forces; the remainder came
from design-supply-erect-build subcontractors.
Shaw direct hired a total of 5,500 craft
workers during the course of the project and
had a peak of 1,700 workers.
August 2010 | POWER
In keeping with the mutual desire to use
Louisiana labor when possible, 45% of
the direct hires were Louisiana residents,
which is unusual for this size of construction
project. Also, of the 45 subcontracts
Shaw placed as part of the project (chimney,
cooling water intake and outfall structures,
fuel handling, and the like), 25 were
with Louisiana companies. According
www.powermag.com
straight line. Instead, it has to maneuver
around a number of obstacles, going over one
state highway and under Interstate 49 within
a relatively constrained horizontal space.
The pipe conveyor, supplied by Dearborn
Mid-West Conveyor Co. (DMW) and
FLSmidth Koch, headquartered in Wadgassen,
Germany, avoids the need for expensive
transfer tower structures and fuel
chutework required for a conventional conveyor.
The pipe conveyor design is, according
to DMW, " a belt conveyor wrapped into
a tube shape [to] allow the pipe conveyor
39

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POWER August 2010

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