Defying the Odds: Greenfield Global Partners with Alpha Automation to Deliver a New Plant

The Life Sciences industry has led healthcare innovation in recent years, with massive growth even before the global pandemic, as researchers and innovators sought new ways to tackle large-scale health challenges.

Although still in its infancy, analysts predict rapid growth in pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and medical devices. To meet this potential, companies delivering raw materials and ingredients must scale with global demand.

One such company is Greenfield Global. Partnering with Alpha Automation & Controls, they operationalised a new ethanol production and distribution plant despite pandemic-related challenges. This plant now supports Greenfield’s Life Sciences customers in Europe and global market expansion.

Starting with an ambitious plan, Greenfield Global, a Canadian ethanol producer, is headquartered in Toronto and supplies raw materials for specialty chemicals, distilled spirits, and renewable energy sectors.

Its products are used across a range of industries, including biomedicine, food and beverage and renewable energy. Already operating a tightly integrated network of distilleries in North America, the company wanted to expand its presence into Europe. A new facility would open up new commercial opportunities, with a primary focus on serving the needs of the fast-expanding Life Sciences sector as well as a host of other strategically important sectors in the region.

The company chose to build its new plant in Portlaoise, Ireland. The plant, which includes a 41,000 square foot facility with 15,000 square feet of warehousing, was created to produce GMP Aqueous Solutions, serving global life science, food, flavour and fragrance customers.

Greenfield chose Ireland primarily to serve the many Life Science customers now manufacturing in Ireland, but also because the company sees Ireland as a natural gateway to the EU market.

Furthermore, the CETA agreement has meant Greenfield could connect its North American and EU operations more easily. The plant specialises in serving biotech customers, delivering bioprocess solutions, high-purity ethanol and IPA products, using high quality USP-grade purified water and WFI generation in the production process. As a sustainability-focused business, the company wanted to ensure a zero-waste facility, with materials from the ethanol production processes being used for other purposes such as farming.

Building a Network of Partners

As the company set out on development of the new facility in 2019, the priorities included equipping the plant with the latest process and control technologies. As it was building the site from scratch, the company did not have any of the limitations associated with legacy plant infrastructure. Greenfield management understood that to build a plant that could meet today’s needs and be ready for future growth, an adaptable and scalable architecture would be crucial.

In order to get insight and access to the most cutting-edge solutions, Greenfield worked closely with Alpha Automation & Controls.

Alpha Automation & Controls had the expertise to compose the correct set of Rockwell technologies and lend valuable integration support to Greenfield. In selecting a Distributed

Control System (DCS) that could serve the reliability and scalability Greenfield required, Alpha Automation & Controls recommended PlantPAx 5.0 – the latest generation of Rockwell’s control technology.

An Unexpected Test

The design of the plant started in January 2020 with an ambitious timeline set out for construction, civil engineering, equipment installation and operation.

“The collaboration between Greenfield and Alpha Automation & Controls has been conducive to tremendous results.”

In normal circumstances, building a facility of this nature would require around 12 months, but given the strategic importance of the new facility plans were drawn to an accelerated timeline. Then, in March 2020, the world went into global lockdown, meaning the challenges involved in getting the site operational and completed by the target date intensified almost overnight.

“We had around 30 contractors on site the week that the lockdown started. We had to think on our feet about how we could keep the site open and continue our progress, all while maintaining worker safety,” said Ken Finegan, MD of Greenfield. Global. Given the urgency of supporting the Life Sciences sector during a crucial period, the original time commitment was maintained and development work was expedited.

This required the team to find alternative ways of commissioning control equipment, including utilising remote commissioning and qualification and relying on remote training to get workers up to speed on using the systems. “Our approach involved engineers and developers on both sides of the Atlantic working around the clock to get everything up and running.

“We were able to bring stakeholders in North America into the process to make sure they were involved in critical decisions. It was a huge global effort, including many different departments within Greenfield and across our network, ” Ken added.

The plant went live in a remarkably short amount of time, going into full production in October 2020 and shipping product by the end of the year. This meant the plant was able to supply raw materials in response to COVID-19 demands. The Role of Control The remarkable turnaround involved a great deal of effort across various aspects of development, not least in regard to the plant’s control system.

The use of PlantPAx 5.0 helped the team to collaborate effectively and work in an agile and responsive way. The system enabled engineers to progress in development work at a fast pace, leveraging existing libraries and templates and enabling quicker documentation processes. “When commissioning a new plant, the early stages can be the most crucial. Any bottlenecks in development and testing can have knock on effects that impact the entire project timeline. Using PlantPAx meant development was smoother to complete and review processes were a lot easier,” said Richard Stapleton, Commercial Director at Alpha Automation & Controls.

Exploring New Opportunities

The site has now been operational for nearly a year and the process network underpinning its operations has already proven robust and reliable. With bold plans for

its EU operations, Greenfield is already looking ahead to plant expansion.

According to Ken Finegan: “We’re anything but a static organisation so we’re already looking towards the ways we can deliver new products and better serve our customers.

While the global circumstances made getting to the current point more difficult than a normal plant commissioning process, Ken has felt the support of the network that was assembled. “The collaboration between Greenfield and Alpha Automation & Controls has been conducive to tremendous results. Through our great relationship we were able to work together under challenging circumstances.

We’ve felt well supported throughout the process, including with aftercare support. Importantly, we’ve been able to give our customers strong guarantees on deliveries, which has helped to set a high standard that we’ll continue to work to as we grow,” Ken concluded.