Our work on Tronox’s KMK Cogeneration Facility

We recently caught up with our team at Tronox’s Kerr McGee Kwinana (KMK) Cogeneration Facility for an update on the work they do there.  

The Cogeneration Facility is a small power station that operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, generating Superheated Steam for the Tronox TiO2 Pigment Plant and electricity for the South-West Interconnected System (SWIS) electricity distribution network.  

Impressively, the Monadelphous team who fully operate and maintain the KMK Cogeneration Facility have had zero recordable health, safety and environment (HSE) incidents for around 10 years, since November 2011.  

Site Manager Timothy Harrison said that this record is something to be proud of and is a result of the team’s commitment to safety.  

“The team are incredibly dedicated and the safety record they have maintained throughout the years is outstanding,” he said. 

“We also have great retention onsite, with the majority of the team having been there for over 10 years.” 

The team provide the operational and maintenance services for the day-to-day running of the Cogeneration Facility. The facility is a “ring fenced” operation from its owner Tronox, meaning the Monadelphous team are responsible for developing and managing their own systems including lock out / tag out; permits to work; stores ordering and receivals; spare part inventory management; maintenance planning and execution; outage planning and execution; plant operations; and emergency response plans.  

Timothy said that their focus is on output production of reliable steam and the increases in recent years to annual reliability have supported the refinery to achieve record production results, including pigment quality.  

“Overall, this contract gives Monadelphous a good grounding in plant operations and plant management and is really interesting work to be involved in,” he said.  

The site crew oversees annual planned outages and take on supervisory roles, leading independent local contractors to conduct the required works on each area of the Cogeneration plant. 

The team are currently planning to execute an $8 million planned outage in late 2022 to early 2023 as the gas turbine at the plant has reached the end of its life at 200,000 hours of operation.  

The upcoming outage will involve replacement of all blading and shafting which will give the gas turbine a further 100,000 hours of usable life. The outage will take 28 days and the team will manage the plant operational shut down, as well as maintenance for the whole of site and commissioning through to return to normal operations. 

The facility is located in Kwinana Beach at the north-west tip of the Tronox Pigment Plant and is owned by Tronox Holdings.  It forms part of Tronox’s operations in Western Australia which represent the world’s largest integrated Titanium Dioxide project.