Teesside runs chemical, fertiliser and energy plant across Wilton, Seal Sands and Billingham, and most of it opens its exchangers to a shutdown programme, not on demand. Send the unit details and the site, and a specialist will come back to you.
Submit a cleaning request
Four steps: unit, deposit, postcode, contact details.
01What is there
Heat exchanger cleaning on Teesside is turnaround work on one of the largest process clusters in the UK, and it is a cluster in the middle of a substantial change. Some of the plant that defined the area has gone; a great deal of chemical, fertiliser, energy and terminal duty continues, and new carbon capture and hydrogen infrastructure is being built alongside it. What has not changed is that exchangers here come apart in a planned window and not otherwise.
02What gets cleaned
A refinery cluster has a broadly known deposit. A chemical cluster does not: what is in the exchanger depends on what that particular plant makes.
Polymer, salts, catalyst fines and reaction by-products are the common deposits across the chemical parks, and they vary between operators on the same site. That is why work on Teesside chemical plant starts with a sample, not a method. The residue is frequently a concentrated, degraded version of the process stream, and it can carry hazards the stream itself does not.
Fertiliser production runs exchangers in acid service, and the metallurgy chosen to survive that service narrows the cleaning chemistry considerably. Compatibility is established before the deposit is discussed, because an acid selected on the deposit alone can write off equipment with long lead times.
Power, energy from waste and biomass plant across the Tees runs surface condensers, auxiliary coolers and flue gas equipment, all of which foul on schedules driven by availability and not by condition. Tank terminals bring heaters and coolers with heavy hydrocarbon residues.
Where operators draw from common cooling water infrastructure, the biofouling and scaling behaviour tends to be similar across the site. Estuarine water brings silt and biological load, and units on that duty foul faster than a closed circuit equivalent.
03What happens next
The enquiry goes straight to a contractor who cleans that unit type. There is no qualifying call in between.
You send the unit details, the deposit and the postcode.
The enquiry goes to a specialist set up for that unit type and that fouling.
They come back with method, timescale and price.
The clean is carried out in place or off site, and the unit is tested before it goes back.
04Questions
In shutdown windows, overwhelmingly. Most of the process plant here opens its exchangers to a turnaround programme agreed months ahead, and the scope is set long before anyone mobilises.
Between turnarounds the work is in-place chemical cleaning on units that can be isolated, plus breakdown response where something has failed. If a unit is on the critical path for the next shutdown, the useful time to enquire is when the scope is being written instead of when the plant is down.
It removes one large consumer of exchanger cleaning and it does not remove the cluster. The Olefins 6 cracker at Wilton had been offline since the end of 2020 before closure was confirmed, so the practical effect on live plant had already happened.
The polyethylene plant continues, as does fertiliser production at Billingham, the energy and terminal operations, and the rest of the chemical parks. Decommissioning also generates its own cleaning and decontamination work, which is a different scope from maintenance cleaning but real.
That the site's own procedures govern, never the contractor's. Wilton, Seal Sands and Billingham all operate permit-to-work systems with isolation, lock-off, gas testing and confined space arrangements, and access requires the relevant safety passport and site induction.
Allow for it in the programme. On a first visit to a site, induction and permit issue routinely take a working day before any productive work starts.
Where it can be isolated against a spare or a bypass, yes, and in-place circulation is the normal route. Plenty of Teesside plant has that redundancy on utility duties.
Process-side exchangers on a continuous unit usually cannot. There the choice is to hold the unit to the next planned window with in-place cleaning where possible, or to take an unplanned outage, which on a shared-utilities site can affect neighbouring operators as well.
On chemical plant it frequently is, and it is often more hazardous than the process stream. A deposit is material that came out of solution and stayed, so it is a concentrate. Heavy metals, catalyst residues and reaction by-products all concentrate that way.
It can also be a different substance from anything on the process safety data sheet, because it has degraded or reacted in place. This is the main argument for sampling before selecting a method, not after.
Teesside has a dense industrial services base, so response for a unit that is down is generally measured in hours to a day rather than longer, subject to permit and induction requirements.
The realistic constraint is usually site access and not travel. A contractor already inducted on the site is considerably quicker to mobilise than one arriving for the first time, which is worth mentioning in an enquiry.
05Other areas
Unit, deposit and postcode are enough to start. Your details go to a specialist who cleans that unit type. No obligation.
