R22 Refrigeration Case Study

£5million project completed at GSK

PROjEN PLC has successfully completed an award winning £5 million project at GlaxoSmithKline to increase cooling capacity and replace ozone depleting HCFC based chillers at their Stevenage site. 

GSK have nine pharmaceutical R&D facilities in the UK and the Stevenage site houses their largest chemistry pilot plant for scaling up new medicines and vaccines.

GSK turned to PROjEN, a multi disciplined organisation, to design and plan the replacement of the HCFC based chiller package in order to meet the increase in demand for cooling and conform to the Montreal Protocol, which requires refrigerants such as R22 to be fazed out of operation by 2010.

In December 2003 PROjEN were awarded the managing contractor role and PROjEN provided GSK with a team of multi-disciplined professionals led by project manager Steve Campbell.   The complex eight month project involved a mix of new and retrofit activities and was made further difficult by a need to reduce the original shutdown availability from six to four weeks.  The PROjEN team worked along side the GSK engineers to ensure that the project was kept to timescales and budgets and delivered the required performance.

The project, for which PROjEN were awarded the ECI ACTIVE ‘project of the year award for 2004’ for their management of the overall project, saw the replacement of two existing chiller units with two state of the art, 1MW, chiller packages of higher capacity and efficiency which also included the need for a new building to house part of the new system.

As well as increasing the refrigeration capacity and removing dependence on the R22 refrigerant, new HTF pumps and improved control systems were integrated with the existing package and all major work was carried out within a shut down period of 30 days.

PROjEN managing director John Taylor said, “The GSK project was highly critical to GSK’s future production and it was imperative that deadlines were kept to and the performance criteria were met.  Despite the many difficulties encountered along the way the client is delighted with the outcome.  A key factor has been the working culture of both businesses with the focus being on getting the job done.”

For more information about PROjEN and our services visit Project Management Support