CUSTOMER: Giga – Pietro Fiorentini
AREA: Chemicals, Oil & Gas – Gas Production and Distribution
YEAR: 2022
“GIGA Srl is an engineering company specialized in the design of industrial plants based in Milan. Specifically, Giga operates in the Oil & Gas, energy, chemical, petrochemical, pharmaceutical, and water treatment sectors, both in terms of detailed engineering and basic engineering as well as front-end engineering design in which, over the years, Giga has gained significant experience, and stress analysis.
Giga has been operating in the Oil & Gas sector for ten years, but the background of plant engineering experience of its operators exceeds thirty years,, especially as regards modularized plants and “skid-mounted” plants. Giga is also qualified as a supplier of engineering services to the main Italian companies in the Oil & Gas and energy sectors.
Pietro Fiorentini, founded in Bologna in 1940, is among the major industrial companies in northeastern Italy and is recognized as a historical brand of national interest. With over 80 years of experience throughout the natural gas supply chain, the Group has now expanded its horizons towards the development of technologies and solutions for a digital and sustainable world, with particular attention to projects related to renewable energies.”
The target
” Not working on standard designs, but always operating on individual orders with different themes each time,” says Giuseppe Gaudiomonte, Technical Manager at Giga, “compressing the implementation times as much as possible is, today more than ever, of fundamental importance in the engineering sector. Nowadays major orders are always subject to penalties for delayed delivery. Additionally, given the current general situation, material procurement times are increasingly longer, resulting in even shorter available times for engineering.” In the past, Giga had used various software solutions for plant design, which, although valid, showed limitations regarding execution speed, versatility, and interface between the various disciplines.
Therefore, it became the company’s primary objective to be able to take advantage of adequate software that would overcome these limitations and allow the streamlined management of all information flows related to detailed engineering and the procurement lists for all materials.”
The answer
“Having been operating in the plant engineering sector for many years,” continues Gaudiomonte, “we already had a comprehensive view of the various plant design software available on the market, either having used them directly or through companies with which we had collaborated. In particular, we had received excellent feedback on ESApro, so two years ago, we decided to adopt it. The choice of ESApro was also based on the possibility of having a complete package that is simple and fast to use, with reasonable costs and immediate management capabilities, in order to deal with all the issues described above in the best possible way.. The decision was mainly based on the fact that ESApro offers a single solution to manage piping, supports, structures, and P&ID with the various modules that ESApro is equipped with.”
The case
“In 2021, Giga Srl directly acquires a contract from Pietro Fiorentini Spa, a historic leading company throughout the natural gas supply chain. The project involves significant challenges related to procurement timelines and compliance with process requirements, as it concerns a series of TEG plants for Stogit, destined for the gas storage site in Fiume Treste, Abruzzo, and the Ripalta Cremasca power plant in Lombardy. All of this is in strict accordance with the restrictive project specifications to refer to.
Additional factors that considerably increased the difficulty coefficient in this specific case were constraints related to the available space and the transportability of the entire pre-assembled plant—both stringent requirements that were brilliantly satisfied during the engineering development.
A triethylene glycol (TEG) gas dehydration system is a setup used to remove water vapor from freshly recovered natural gas. This drying equipment uses liquid triethylene glycol as a dehydration agent to extract water from a natural gas stream flowing over it. One of the main advantages of using a TEG dehydration unit is the ability to recycle the drying fluid multiple times before replacement. This seemingly straightforward technology requires attention and expertise in detailed engineering development, especially regarding cascade flows, pipe slopes, etc.; experience that Giga and its operators have developed in the past while realizing TEG plants for some of the most significant end-users all over the world.
Therefore, it was necessary to use software that allowed the correct interface between disciplines and that could quickly and easily manage all the outputs to the workshop in charge of construction.”
The result
“The use of the ESApro suite,” concludes Gaudiomonte, “has yielded more than satisfactory results for both GIGA and the end customer. The high degree of automation has made it possible to reduce engineering times and, most importantly, to minimize, or almost eliminate, errors in the material procurement and construction phases.
Indeed, all necessary construction documents have been generated, such as piping isometrics, material lists, construction drawings for structures and supports, and general assembly drawings. Documents like data sheets for manual and instrument valves have also been created, along with material lists for piping all comprehensive or categorized by line.”
