Jeremy Keller

THE WORST PROJECT OF ALL People always ask me, "Mikey, what's the worst project you've ever had to work on?" and I always answer, I'm glad you asked that question. Good news: my company got the NASA contract to provide liquid hydrogen ("LH2") to fuel the Space Shuttle. So, we needed to build a LH2 plant. We already had one called NOLA LH2, which was in New Orleans. Now, NOLA LH2 had some, let's say, "troubles." What kind of troubles, you might ask. Well, I'll tell you what kind of troubles. Consider hydrogen for a moment. This substance has the smallest, tiniest, teensiest molecules. You leak check a system using helium, but test it with hydrogen? Leaks like a sieve. Consider also that hydrogen is gonna leak no matter what. It will pass through steel like a ghost through a wall. It's called "permeation." And hydrogen, when it hits normal air, lights itself on fire (probably from static electricity). And a hydrogen fire is invisible. So at the truck loading area, there are so many instances of hydrogen leaks that operators walking in the area to do their duty would have to wave a straw broom in front of them. Straw broom explodes when hydrogen hits it. So, if your broom blows up, don't walk there. Now, before the liquid hydrogen goes into a truck, it passes through a filter. It's a cylinder about the size of one of those 5-gallon containers you see at Lowes or Home Depot. It's got to be cleaned before loading, see. But you can't just open it up because if you do, all those 5 gallons of hydrogen and the volume in the piping to the filter will catch fire and it will be bad. In point of fact, it would explode. So first, you purge the system with nitrogen, the inert gas that composes 78% or so of normal air. That nitrogen sweeps through the piping and filter and takes all that volume that used to have hydrogen and puts it out to an elevated vent pipe (a "flare"), where it burns off harmlessly. After the nitrogen purge, you can safely open up the top lid of the filter to get the basket out to clean it. So it's a normal Tuesday. The operator, let's call him Bub, purges out the filter with nitrogen, then opens the lid. Now, the filter is at nipple-level. And when the lid opens up, Bub gets a facefull of hydrogen. And thanks to skin oil, hydrogen + air's oxygen + skin oil = explosion. After emergency medical treatment, Bub no longer had a face. It was all scar tissue. They put in one tube where his nostrils used to be and one tube in where his lips used to be. Now he could breathe and get nutrition from a liquid diet. But he had no eyes, no eyebrows, no nose, no lips, no chin. Just this mass of blotchy red and black scar tissue. He would have made a great monster in a horror movie. I was told that the lawsuit settlement was rather large. How much is your face worth? Over ten million clams, I heard. First, though, he had to assert he'd correctly purged out the filter, but the company took one look at where his face used to be and correctly concluded that even with a perfect legal case, any jury would award Bub far more than a settlement would. So, here's ten million smackers - hand over your face. There were other troubles. NOLA LH2 was leaking badly everywhere. It was at EOL - that means end-of-life. It would limp on while we built our LH2 project in Pace, Florida. Now, Pace, Florida is a few houses and a Taco Bell. We would build on a chemical plant that our company owned. But the chemicals guys (1) hated the gas guys and (2) reported to different management. To their credit, the chemicals guys - acting as an internal client - were exacting about safety. They were safety first and last. The hosting plant site, a few blocks over, had bullets of high pressure toxic liquid that once caused another monster to be created when a relief valve leaked and they called for a volunteer to shut its isolation valve and stop the leak. See, this chemical was so toxic that the vapor cloud would kill the neighbors. This stuff was nasty. You know when Aunt Maude had that dead rat trapped behind the stove? And it made the kitchen smell of death and decay? Same smell this stuff had. One drop could be smelled 20 miles away. When the volunteer - who had no children or pets and whose parents had passed on - went to isolate the valve, it destroyed most of his central nervous system and melted off most of his skin (there had been no time to get him into a steam suit). This guy didn't sue - he just wanted a job for life. I first met him when he lurched into the office I'd been given and croaked, groaned, moaned and growled. No one had prepared me for this guy, who was the mail delivery guy. Terrifying. So, justifiably, the chemicals guys were safety Nazis. And proud of it. But they stupidly tried to force their chemical plant standards on us. Just one example out of a hundred - when they had a piping flange, you know, to connect one pipe to another, they'd put in a "spectacle blind." This is a figure-8 made of steel. One circle of the 8 has the center part of the steel cut out to match the inner diameter of the pipe. The other one is uncut, just a circular plate. The idea is, if you see a circle? That means the plate is bolted into the pipe flange to isolate the pipe. If you see a plate, that means the pipe is fully connected. Simple and elegant, yes? So they insisted our prefabricated piping lengths (called "spools") have, at their connection points to connect one spool to another, a spectacle blind. We tried to tell them that LH2 is within a couple dozen degrees of absolute zero. If you ran it past a spectacle blind, you'd form an iceball the size of a Mercedes van and block the pipe. It would form its own "freeze seal." Our spools connected with bayonets. In LH2 piping, it's a pipe within a pipe. Between the inner stainless steel pipe and the outer carbon steel pipe (the "jacket") is a vacuum. You put a vacuum pump on it and suck out all the air. That vacuum keeps the stuff inside the inner pipe insulated. You connect one spool to another spool by having the outer jacket neck down and make a cone about 6' long. That cone ("bayonet") gets inserted into a matching shape in the next spool. This way, you minimize heat entry to the pipe. The chemicals guys refused to allow our VJ (vacuum jacketed) pipe to use bayonets and insisted on spectacle blinds with conventional flanges. We ignored them and went about our business, and then they forced a stop work order. We essentially had an internal "lawsuit" to involve the CEO himself to explain to the VP Chemicals that his division was being stupid. That became a month delay, and all the while management was breathing down our throats about being behind schedule. Oh yeah, whoever came up with the schedule should have been whacked with a big stick. And budget, too. In fairness, how do you originate the schedule and budget for something you've never built and no one else has built? Same reason the moon shot and the Space Shuttle were over budget. We were a year late and our cost forecast was double the budget. So, yeah, every monthly meeting with senior management was just a whipping session. I got sent to the plant as field engineer (I was the number 2 guy on the job, working for Rocket Ron, the project manager). Rocket Ron was so named because he was volatile as hell and when given bad news would blast off until only his sneakers showed below the ceiling tiles. People were terrified of Rocket Ron, but he confided to me that was always just pretending to intimidate people. He acted in his small town's professional theater with leading man roles. Anyway, due to cost and schedule pressure, we were building a plant that had new technology ("frontier technology") and no pilot plant. Look, you want to try a new process technology? Fine. Build a pilot plant that demonstrates it'll fookin work. Oh no, we skipped the whole proof of concept part. So, in our "cold box" that had plate/frame aluminum heat exchangers and aluminum piping, the heat exchangers were to be manufactured by a very famous Japanese company in Kobe, Japan. There were about 10 of them, each the size of a car. We had monthly meetings with them over the phone, and they were halfway through the contract with 5 units built and 5 still being manufactured. Good news, right? Wrong. Headline news: KOBE, JAPAN HIT WITH MEGA EARTHQUAKE. Oh fuck. It took 10 days before we could get the Japanese on the phone. When we did, we just assumed they would declare "force majeure," which is the excuse that they couldn't fulfill their contract because they suffered an act of God. Rocket Ron: How bad is it? Japanese PM: Bad. All of the completed work is destroyed. The factory was leveled. It is all ruins. All the raw material is, in technical terms, tits-up. Rocket: What will that do to your schedule? (They were originally supposed to ocean ship in 6 months.) JPM: Sir, we will deliver on time. We will skip ocean shipment and air freight them in. That will save 6 weeks. Rocket: Air freight? That's gonna cost half a million dollars. JPM: We know. We will call it an insurable loss. Rocket: Are you seriously telling me you won't be late. JPM: Yes, Rocket-san. You see, you did nothing wrong. You should not be made to suffer. Rocket: Have I told you lately that I love you? We got less lucky on the MR compressor. This was part of the frontier technology, the use of a mixed refrigerant cycle instead of using liquid nitrogen on the front end. We'd basically use a big refrigeration cycle to pre-cool and intercool the hydrogen. By mixed refrigerant, we'd use isopentane and some other exotic chemicals to come up with a mixture with a very specific aggregate atomic number. The trouble? The only 4-stage centrifugal machine that would do the job was made by our good friends in Germany. This was in the pre-Euro days, so we had to purchase this $2m machine with Deutsche Marks. Now, here's where the accountants enter the chat. At some point before delivery we have to pay with German Marks. That means we need to exchange dollars for Marks. And exchange rates change all the time. Now, you can buy a bond, see, that will allow you to make the exchange at a particular rate. Depending on the amount of risk you want to take on the exchange rate. To simplify, I'm carrying $2m for that compressor in my cost forecast. But it could blow up to $4m or even 5 if the exchange rate for Marks tanks. Or, I'd get lucky and that $2m machine might only cost half a mil, right? So we had to make a decision on the exchange rate. We made the wrong one. That $2m machine ended up costing us 5, dammit. Hence, yet more abuse from the bosses. But it got worse, see? Remember I told you about frontier technology and how we went ahead without a pilot plant for proof of concept? Yeah. On our attempts to start up the completed plant? We couldn't get the MR compressor to come up to speed. The mixed refrigerant was too dense, too heavy, to allow the unit to come up to full RPMs. So we had to dump the entire $50k charge of refrigeration chemicals (with no designed-in way to recover them) and put in the lighter elements to get the machine to spin up to full speed, then slowly bleed in the heavier components, and to get this procedure to work, we went through 10 charges (half a million clams worth) and even then, the machine would only run for a day or two, and then you'd have to dump and recharge and kiss good-bye another $50k. The bosses were big mad at the process engineers. We couldn't get the plant to run. So we scrapped the MR technology and went back to using liquid nitrogen on the front end. But that meant we had to design and build one. Figure $10m and another year of delay to a project that was already $50 over budget and a year late. And guess what? NASA got mad and terminated the fuel contract. "You get nothing! Good day, sir!" Which made the plant, which now featured a front end of liquid nitrogen, a white elephant (a useless thing). So it all got demolished. If you go to google Earth and look for it at the chemical plant in Pace? It ain't there. Imagine how you feel when the project you sweated blood over for 3 years doesn't work and gets taken down by bulldozers, with the whole company looking at you like you're a failure. Now, add the pain of that to Divorce 1.0 + Paternity Lawsuit and you have a pretty good recipe for the precursors to self-yeeting. Which I didn't do. I can prove it. I wrote this, didn't I?