U.S. Plant Maint. to Eclipse $1.1 Billion in Q3

There are 433 active maintenance shutdowns, turnarounds, and outage projects scheduled to begin in the third quarter of 2006 at manufacturing and electrical generating plants in the United States, according to estimates by Industrial Info Resources (www.industrialinfo.com). Spread across key industries including power, oil and gas production, transmission (oil and gas), synthetic fuels, terminals, food and beverage, pulp, paper and wood, pharmaceutical and biotech, petroleum refining, metals and minerals, and chemical processing, the aggregate spending for the quarter is expected to be $1.13 billion. Individual project values range from $1 million and go up to $20 million, with downtime lasting from a few days to as long as six weeks.

Maintenance expenditures slated to begin in July tally up to $679 million from 307 projects, while figures for August show 47 projects worth a combined $125 million, notes Industrial Info Resources. In September, Industrial Info Resources says maintenance downtime will account for $331 million spread across 79 projects.

From an industry perspective, maintenance expenditures will be the highest in the industrial manufacturing sector with $360 million spread across 152 projects. The largest scheduled maintenance project for the period, in terms of total investment value (TIV), is a $20 million outage of a light olefins unit at a Shell petrochemical complex in Texas. Downtime will last 35 days and commence in September. On the basis of duration, a 42-day outage of a power-generating unit at a plant owned by Progress Energy will have the longest downtime of the quarter.

Geographically, Industrial Info Resources says the Great Lakes region will be the most active in inspection, repair, and overhaul projects resulting from 118 shutdowns worth $307 million. Expenditures and project counts for the remaining regions are as follows: Southwest–$265 million (62), Southeast–$146 million (73), Northeast–$138 million (64), Mid-Atlantic–$95 million (51), Midwest–$87 million (35), West Coast–$57 million (14), and New England–$10 million (5).

Figures for the same period in last year, revealed 386 scheduled maintenance projects that had a combined value of $1.8 billion. In contrast, project activity is higher in 2006, however, the overall value of investment dollars is off by 37.2 percent.