Volvo Aero Corporation maintains and overhauls gas turbine engines used in oil and gas production all over the world. One such customer is Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij (NAM) in the Netherlands.
NAM, who are owned by Shell and Exxon, use an LM1600 gas turbine engine to compress natural gas extracted from the North Sea on a platform off the coast of Ameland, one of the Dutch Wadden islands in the north of the country, and pump it to the mainland.
NAM’s LM1600, which is a derivative of General Electric’s F404 military aero engine, is running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week so the demand for reliability and availability is extremely high. There is no stand-by power source on the Ameland platform so if the LM1600 stops, gas production stops and hundreds of thousands of dollars of business can be lost in just a few hours.
Maintenance work
Regular inspections of the engine are performed by Volvo Aero’s field service technicians as well as fault diagnosis and any rectifications that can be performed on the platform.
Work requiring the engine to be removed; hot section refurbishment or full overhaul for example, is carried out back at the Volvo Aero workshop in Trollhättan, Sweden. During these periods, NAM use a spare engine leased from Volvo Aero to ensure continued gas production.
In cases of unscheduled maintenance being necessary, Volvo Aero’s “hotline” is used by NAM. Technicians are on 24 hour standby to travel to the Netherlands and be flown out to the platform at short notice.