Waterfall Project Manager Simulation — Marathon Petroleum

The scenario

Marathon Petroleum's Garyville refinery — at roughly 597,000 barrels per day, the third-largest in North America — runs its on-road diesel almost entirely through Unit 12, the diesel hydrotreater (DHT). The DHT's catalyst removes sulfur and nitrogen so the product meets the 15-ppm ultra-low-sulfur diesel (ULSD) specification. That catalyst is now spent: pressure drop across the reactor bed has climbed, the unit can no longer hit ULSD sulfur targets at full rate, and the reliability program has scheduled a catalyst-replacement campaign to pull the old catalyst and load a fresh charge of Honeywell UOP hydroprocessing catalyst. The campaign happens inside a fixed 14-day catalyst-out window. The window is not a target — it is a commercial and physical constraint. The DHT feeds the on-road diesel pool; while it is down, Garyville either runs the diesel blend short or buys finished product to cover supply contracts, and every day the unit is out past restart costs the refinery on the order of $1.5M in lost diesel margin. The window also lives inside a larger plant turndown, so the operating units upstream and downstream are sequenced around the DHT's return. Slip the restart and the slip cascades. The work itself is unforgiving. The reactor must be brought down, cooled, depressured, and purged to an inert nitrogen atmosphere before anyone opens it. Spent catalyst is pyrophoric — it will ignite in air — so it comes out under nitrogen, with crews on supplied air entering an oxygen-deficient vessel under confined-space permit. Then a fresh charge is dense-loaded to a uniform bed, the reactor is closed, and the catalyst is sulfided and activated before the unit can make on-spec product. Four parties have to move in lockstep inside the window: the Turner Industries mechanical crew doing the skim-and-load, the Honeywell UOP technical team supervising the load and activation, the operations team owning turndown and restart, and the HSE inert-entry authority who can stop the job at any reading. You are the project manager who coordinates them — you hold no crew, no permit, and no spec authority of your own. Your job: bring the hydrotreater back making on-spec ULSD before the window closes, without letting the vendor sequencing, the safety permits, or a reactor full of spent catalyst turn fourteen days into fifteen.

What you'll do as the project manager

• →Bring Unit 12 DHT back online making on-spec 15-ppm ULSD at full rate within the fixed 14-day catalyst-out window
• →Execute the catalyst skim, unload, dense load, and reassembly with the Turner Industries crew against the $2.0M PM-managed services baseline with no more than 10% variance
• →Complete reactor inert-entry, unload, and load with zero recordable safety events and full confined-space / nitrogen-entry permit compliance
• →Achieve fresh-catalyst sulfiding and activation to Honeywell UOP's start-of-run activity specification on the first restart, with no re-sulfiding cycle
• →Keep LDEQ Title V shutdown, flaring, and restart notifications current with the actual outage timeline — no late or out-of-window filings

Project management skills you'll build

The challenges you'll navigate

• •The 14-day window has almost no float — any slip in turndown, inert purge, unload, load, or activation cascades directly into a late restart and a lost-margin day at roughly $1.5M each
• •Spent-catalyst unload is the highest-uncertainty step: bed condition is unknown until the reactor is opened, and fused or hard-packed catalyst can turn a 2-day unload into 4 under inert entry
• •Coordination authority is informal — the Turner site superintendent runs his crew, the UOP technical advisor owns the load spec, and HSE owns the permit; the PM aligns them but commands none of them
• •The sulfiding/activation step is a hard gate on restart — rush it and the catalyst makes off-spec diesel; a re-sulfide cycle costs 24-36 hours the window does not have
• •LDEQ Title V notifications are tied to the planned outage dates; if the timeline moves, the filings must move with it or the restart flaring sits outside the permitted window

Technology & stakeholders

You'll manage 7 stakeholders, including Dale Hargrove (General Manager, Garyville Refinery), Renata Guidry (Turnaround Manager, Garyville Refinery), Curtis Lemoine (Operations Superintendent — Unit 12 Diesel Hydrotreater), and more.

What you'll walk away with

A verified, shareable record of a completed enterprise project — plus the PMO deliverables you produced along the way (charter, project plan, SteerCo deck, closure document). It's real, demonstrable project management experience you can put on your resume and speak to in interviews.

Frequently asked questions

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