Documented: Huge quench tower bottom vessel move for a Baytown, Texas petrochemical facility

One of my favorite activities is to shoot for oil and gas companies because the projects are usually large-scale. In this case, literally.

I was hired by a local petrochemical facility to document the move of a huge quench tower, used for cracking ethane into ethylene, a chemical building block for too many consumer and commercial products to list here. There are many moves like this in the building of a petrochemical facility, but this quench tower segment was the biggest move of the project.

The entire process took all night. Two drivers, one at the front and one at the rear, steered the giant, multi-wheeled vehicle that carried the tower, moving at about two miles per hour.

After three rain delays, a small army of people and the logistics and engineering of a space launch, the massive land barge rolled it's way through the night to it's final destination at the construction site.