Fonterra’s earthquake resistant plant

GEA has built a whole milk drying plant for Fonterra in New Zealand.The plant at Pahiatua is on an earthquake fault line and has been designed to withstand a one every 2,500-year event without damage.

GEA has many reference sites in New Zealand for this type of plant including Darfield 2, the world’s largest milk powder dryer. The company supplied all the processing equipment including: milk reception, storage, wet processing including standardisation and homogenisation, evaporation, drying, powder handling, packing and water recovery.

Gary Reynolds, project manager at GEA, says, “All these plants are difficult because of their sheer size, but this was similar to many plants we have built in New Zealand.”

The site does, however include a reverse osmosis plant capable of processing up to 2,000,000 litres a day of cow water and purifying it for reuse in the plant making the new plant virtually self sufficient in water.

Reynolds adds, “This treated water is returned to the process, keeping disposal costs down and ensuring that Fonterra has no need to increase its water resource consents. The RO plant will also produce boiler feed water of very high quality using less chemicals to protect the steam system from corrosion, increasing the life expectancy of the plant and reducing operating costs.

“Our goal was to change the way construction was done in New Zealand. We brought the whole team together in a ‘community’ in which GEA and Fonterra work side by side. There had to be absolute cooperation between us, the client and the builder. There was some steep learning but if we had a problem we just talked it through and found a solution together. It is a very refreshing approach. If we had a disagreement we’d get it out in the open and deal with it.”