The Russian Project
2005-2009 Russia’s First LNG plant
Between 2005 and 2009, I was seconded to Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East, just north of Japan. Our company was exploiting the oil reserves to the North of the Island, but was only able to operate during the summer months when the sea was not frozen.
http://www.sakhalinenergy.ru/en/documents/Prigorodnoye_Asset_eng.pdf
Stage 2 of this project, (where I came in) was to build an 800 km pipeline to a new crude oil export facility on the south of the island. Later the project was upgraded, to include a second pipeline for gas, and a new plant to liquefy it for export mainly to Japan’s power generation industry.
Here in Aniva Bay, the sea still froze during winter, but was not too thick and could be kept open all year round with the help of an ice breaker tug to escort the oil and gas ships into the new port of Prigorodnoye. As part of the commissioning team, I was one of the first permanent employees for our company to arrive on site where the construction company was just bolting together steel frame works prior to standing up vessels and columns.
An amazing array of heavy lift equipment came and went, including the world’s biggest floating crane, with a lift capacity over 3000 tons which lifted the prefab’ed sections of our loading jetty into place.
I was living in the construction camp with around 9000 people from an amazing collection of countries. South African, Turkish, English, Canadian, American, Thai, Pilipino, Kazak, Nepalese scaffolders, Irish, Australian, Swedish, Dutch, Sri Lankan, and even some Russians! Of course most of the local Russians could not speak any English, so we tried to learn Russian!
Climate
All my life I have complained about how cold the winter in my home town of Geelong is. But after spending my first winter in Russia, I realised that this was actually the first winter I had ever seen in my whole life, where the temperature can be as low as minus 35! I could never imagine this was even possible. I thought thermometers where made with the zero at the bottom because once you reach zero, there is nothing left to take away. I was wrong!
Waking up in the morning and shovelling snow off your doorstep so that you can get out, is only fun the first day. Slipping and sliding down the street, and being passed by the Russian’s who are walking sure footed and nibbly across the ice just made me look silly. But I learned the hard way coming out of the boozer one night after a few too many and slipping over on the ice. My chest was so sore the next day, and the doctor later revealed I had broken a rib! I wouldn’t care if I never saw snow again!!!
A great experience
I worked in many different parts of the plant as we commissioned one area and moved on to the next. Some of my greatest achievemtent were: 
the firewater system where we built the building, put together all the pumps and pipework, then flushed the system out. The emergency diesel generators comprising of 1.4MW caterpillar diesels. Gas turbine generators. Water treatement (potable) water. Sewerage treatment. Demineralised water. Emergency air compressors. Read about firepump installation here! Construction camp life energise 10Kv Substation LNG Train overview
Because of my previous marine experience, I played a major role in the commissioning of the LNG loading jetty which I enjoyed very much.
After commissioning, the head of training came to tell me, his training team had no idea how half the plant worked. “And since you have built most of it, you are now our operations trainer. No problems, as I was operator trainer for 7 years at home. This eventually led to me taking the role as apprentice master for the last batch of operations apprentices.
I am very grateful for the time spent in Russia. It was a most interesting assignment, project and country!
