ISLAMABAD, April 18: Challenges faced by the oil and gas, fertilisers and petro-chemical industries both in public and private sectors were discussed at the first ever “Plant Maintenance and Operation Conference’ here on Wednesday.

Hosted by Attock Refinery Limited, stakeholders deliberated upon local resource availability, gap identification, benchmarking with best maintenance and operations practices and gaining updates on the latest plant management solutions.

Officials of the Pak-Arab Fertilisers described “turnaround and shutdowns as major maintenance activities and were of the view that an unplanned outage caused by equipment failure could cost up to 10 times more than a scheduled outage for preventive maintenance.”

They informed the conference that well-planned and executed maintenance shutdowns or turnarounds would result in savings of up to 15 per cent in the costs of maintenance shut downs.

Considering the costs of planning and scheduling maintenance may account for up to one per cent of the total shutdown costs, the savings more than offset its costs. On the other hand, a private sector fertiliser industry showed a remarkable reduction in inventory cost of about 30 million due to enhanced reliability, officials of the industry informed the conference.

The OGDC quality control managers explained details pertaining to evaluation and assessment of plant equipment.

Pakistan Refinery officials believed that maintenance turnarounds are the ‘greatest points of exposure for refineries in terms of safety incidents, production delays and lost profits’.

The maintenance official of Fauji Fertiliser Bin Qasim discussed out of box approaches in maintenance and operation of plants. The technical manager of Attock Refinery presented a detailed analysis of problems faced by the refinery and measures to tackle them.

ARL Chief Executive Adil Khattak while speaking on the occasion urged all stake holders in public and private sectors to make the process of dialogue real and lasting cross-sector networking.