Williams Returning Service at Opal, Wyo. Plant After Fire
Williams Partners has brought back into service two cryogenic processing trains that were shut down when a fire occurred on April 23 at its gas processing facility in Opal, Wyoming.
The fire occurred at TXP-3, one of the five processing trains at the 160-acre facility. The two units now back in service, TXP-1 and TXP-2, have a combined design processing capacity of 395 million cubic feet (MMcf) of gas per day. The two other units that were part of the shutdown, TXP-4 and TXP-5, remain offline as the company works to take the necessary steps to bring additional portions of the plant into service in a safe, systematic and timely manner.
At the time of the incident, the Opal Gas-Processing Plant was processing daily inlet volumes of approximately 1 billion cubic feet (Bcf) of natural gas. The capacity of the TXP-1, TPX-2, TPX-4 and TPX-5 plants totals 1.1 Bcf of gas per day, which is sufficient to handle all of the natural gas currently available to the facility. TXP-4 was idle at the time of the fire, serving as excess capacity for the facility.
The initial visual assessment of damage indicates that the impact was largely limited to a small area of the TXP-3 plant. Information from the company’s visual inspection of the damage area indicates that there was a release of natural gas that was subsequently ignited. The company, in coordination with regulatory agencies, is focusing the investigation on the cause of the release and source of ignition.
The entire facility was put in immediate full shutdown when the fire occurred at approximately 2 p.m. local time on April 23. There were no reported injuries or damage to property outside the facility. The plant’s emergency procedures performed as designed, the company reported.
