Petroleum Refining Timeline

Fluor's first refinery project was the construction of a 10,000 gallons-per-day natural gasoline plant for Richfield Oil Company at Signal Hill, the site of a large oil find the year previous.

In 1932, Shell commissioned Fluor to construct a $100,000 refining unit at Wood River, Illinois, the company's largest refining contract to date.

Fluor was tasked with engineering and construction of the Caribbean commonwealth's first-ever oil refinery, in a landmark engineering and construction contract signed with the Caribbean Refining Company. The San Juan refinery was designed to produce 10,000 barrels of oil per day. The installation at the refinery included a crude unit, a fluid catalytic cracking and fractionation unit, a catalytic polymerizer, and a gas concentration and treating and blending plant. Offsite, additional facilities included a tank farm, boilers and pipelines.

Fluor provided design, engineering, procurement and construction services to expand Esso’s Antwerp refinery to 250,000 BPD capacity. The Esso refinery expansion was the largest of its kind in Europe, yet the site was only 20 acres, which yielded severely limited workspace and significant complexity.

As managing contractor for the Sasol Two complex for oil and gas from coal, Fluor’s scope involved construction management of all but two turnkey units, procurement of bulk materials, coordination of worldwide inspection and expediting and transportation to the field. The large complex included coal mining, gasification and coal gas processing into myriad hydrocarbon and petrochemical products. The facility was designed to process 12.2 million tons per year of low-grade bituminous coal into gasoline diesel fuels, ethylene, ammonia, sulfur and various chemicals and coal tar products.

Fluor was awarded total engineering, procurement and construction management responsibility for an addition at the Phillips plant in Borger, Texas. This modernization program increased Phillips’ capacity to process heavy crude. The Fluor team self-performed more than 90 percent of the work and constructed the project on an open-shop basis. This project was completed on schedule and successfully reached 1,300,000 work hours without a lost-time accident.

Fluor performed the engineering, and as prime contractor, had overall responsibility for Sasol Three. The oil-from-coal complex was a replica of Sasol II and was to convert 50,000 tons per day of low-grade bituminous coal into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, and other petroleum and chemical products. The project achieved 20 million safe work hours in 1982, a world safety record at the time.

In 1984, Fluor completed an extensive refinery modernization project at Texaco's Convent, Louisiana refinery, which included several new units and a revamp of existing facilities. The new facilities included a 35,000 BPD NO Unit, 100,000 BPD Crude/Vacuum Unit #2 and 62.5 MSCFD hydrogen plant.

Fluor Canada, in conjunction with its partner Kilborn, set design records when it was awarded NewGrade Energy Inc.’s Phase I and II contract as Support Engineering Contractor for its major refinery expansion in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Fluor's responsibilities included detailed engineering for the onsites, offsites and utilities revamp of the Atmospheric Residuum Desulphurization Units and Hydrogen Recovery and Compression. Fluor Canada was also responsible for the construction as well as the project and material management of the total project.

New Canadian environmental regulations prohibiting lead in gasoline required Petro-Canada to initiate an Isomerization Plant at the Edmonton Refinery. Fluor performed engineering, procurement and construction for this 10,000 BPD grassroots Isomerization project. Modularization enabled construction progress of 13% per month.

At Port Stanvac, a Fluor Joint Venture provided an isomerisation unit to upgrade the octane rating of light virgin naphtha as part of Australia’s move to lead-free petrol. This project included a revamp of a catalytic reformer unit. Fluor provided engineering and construction management services for a new bitumen plant, a fuel gas project that increased production of liquefied petroleum gas and a vacuum stripper that improved the value of by-products. At Altona, Fluor projects included engineering, procurement and construction of a new Lo-Cat sulphur plant, additional crude storage facilities, the conversion of a preheater into a catalytic naphtha hydrotreater to stabilise diesel fuels, and upgrades of the amine unit, the No. 2 Crude Unit and metering.

Fluor performed detailed engineering, procurement and construction of a 2,200 BPSD MTBE unit and 2,310 BPSD TAME unit at Valero's Corpus Christi refinery. Other facilities involved a 40,000 BPSD depentanizer, 8,000 BPSD selective hydrogenation unit

Fluor was responsible for basic engineering, worldwide procurement, licensor review, supervision of detail design and supervision of the construction contractors for Yukong Limited’s Fluid Catalytic Cracking (FCC) project. The FCC expansion allowed Yukong’s Ulsan refinery to operate in excess of 800,000 barrels per day of crude, making the refinery one of the world’s largest at the time. Mechanical completion was achieved in July 1996, with commissioning and start-up achieved in October 1996.

As part of its worldwide “Clean Cities” program, BP chose Brisbane as one of the 40 initial cities to produce clean fuels. The Bulwer Island Refinery expansion and Clean Fuels Project was to produce fuels with a low sulphur content. Fluor provided the conceptual design and worked in alliance with the licensee and BP on the front-end engineering for the hydrocracker for the project. The result of the project was one of the world’s fastest and safest at the time commissioning and start-up periods for a hydrocracker. BP’s Clean Fuels project was recognized with the 2001 Australian Construction Achievement Award.

Fluor was contracted by OMV to perform the engineering, procurement and construction management for the Isomerization and HDS-2 Revamp Project. The project included extensive modifications of existing facilities and for the isomerization unit, a new reactor and stabilizer section, DIH Column and overhaul of H2 - compressors; for the HDS-2 Unit, a new high-pressure section and the revamp of the existing compressor.

In 2002, the South African government announced a clean fuels initiative to remove lead from petroleum and reduce sulfur levels of petrol and diesel fuels. That initiative marked the largest collective investment period in the history of the South African fuel industry. SAPREF announced a 700 million rand investment to upgrade the refinery at Durban and selected Fluor for the engineering, procurement, construction and commissioning. The refinery at Durban is South Africa’s largest crude oil refinery.

Fluor has carried out 18 successful projects for the Gdańsk refinery in Gdańsk, Poland since beginning studies for modernization and upgrades in 1994. The most recent was a contract for utilities and offsites at a total installed cost of $333.6 million, completed in 2010. The investment projects at the Gdańsk refinery have been generally focused on improvement of LOTOS’ competitiveness in the market. Projects include refinery modernization and expansions to increase capacity.

Fluor helped the Porto Refinery, owned by Petrogal, a subsidiary of Galp Energia, to produce an estimated 2.3 million tonnes per year of diesel, gasoline and kerosene fuels and to meet European environmental regulations. Fluor performed FEED, engineering, procurement and construction for new and revamped units within the refinery and outside the baseline. When completed, the refinery produced about 2.3 million tonnes per year of diesel, gasoline and kerosene fuels.

The alliance is a mix of Fluor and Irving employees who together deliver capital projects to support the 300,000 barrel/day refinery and associated marine terminals. Started in 1997, the alliance executes an average of $100 million per year of sustaining capital projects and up to $300 million per year of large investment capital projects. In 2012, Irving Oil and Fluor celebrated the 15-year anniversary of the two companies’ business alliance. Fluor teams provide engineering, procurement and construction support to projects, completing more than 3.4 million work hours on alliance projects.

A Fluor joint venture was selected in a public tender as the most competitive bidder to design, construct and commission KNPC’s Mina Abdullah Package 2 Clean Fuels project. Fluor began detailed engineering and design in 2014 and started construction in 2015. The MAB2 package facility comprises a world-scale hydrogen plant (steam reformers), sulfur block (SWS, ARU, SRU) and utilities, offsites and non-process buildings. It also covers modifications to the existing Mina Abdullah refinery units.

Fluor is providing front end engineering, detailed engineering, procurement, fabrication, construction and pre-commissioning for 3 units of the North West Redwater Sturgeon Refinery. These units are: Unit 10 (Crude and Vacuum), Unit 20 (LC Finer), and Unit 30 (Hydroprocessing). The client is the North West Redwater Partnership (NWR), a joint venture comprising two Calgary based companies: North West Upgrading, Inc. and Canadian Natural Upgrading Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Canadian Natural Resources Limited.

In 2018, Fluor achieved substantial engineering completion for Marathon Petroleum Corporation's Tier 3 gasoline sulfur standard reconfiguration project at the Galveston Bay refinery in Texas City, Texas. Fluor is providing engineering, procurement and construction management services, which will enable the refinery to achieve updated U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Tier 3 gasoline sulfur standards by 2020 and provide cleaner fuel to U.S. markets.