Tough Times for BASF

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In the German chemical industry this compact production principle is called "der Verbund," which roughly translates as "the interconnection." In Ludwigshafen they are incredibly proud that their main American competitor, Dow Chemical, also refers to "the verbund" because there is no better equivalent in English.

Crude oil and natural gas are the essential starting materials for BASF. The raw materials are transported via pipelines and tankers to the plant, where huge facilities known as crackers break them down into their chemical components. These are then redistributed to adjacent units, where over a thousand different formulas are used to produce new chemical compounds.

The ammonia facility supplies the ingredients for dozens of mixtures. Urea is produced to manufacture tabletops and waste gas purifiers, and nitric acid is used for explosives and solvents. Some chemicals are refined to create automotive coatings, while others are used in permanent press shirts. A considerable proportion of the production is still processed to make chemical fertilizers that farmers use to reap rich harvests even from barren soils.

Switching Off the Ammonia

This process demands a great deal of experience and precise coordination, but it becomes really complicated when there is no application available for certain products. It is dangerous to produce large supplies of poisonous substances like ammonia and store them on the plant premises. At the same time, there is always a unit somewhere in the verbund that urgently requires ammonia.

BASF has therefore made strict rules concerning the conditions under which the ammonia unit can be switched off. This is regularly done every five years when basic repairs and inspections have to be made. The planning for such routine checks begins roughly a year in advance. There are instructional manuals over a hundred pages long where each procedure and sequence of actions is precisely determined. Up until now, however, no one has determined what needs to be done when the world is plunged into a sudden economic crisis.

Two men wearing immaculate white lab coats—Rainer Feser, 56, and Michael Mauss, 49—are responsible for shutting down the units. Actually they thought they had roughly eight months before the next scheduled maintenance. Now they have to turn off the machines within a few weeks, and you can tell that they haven't slept much recently.

Their troubles started with the weather. Normally, the units are switched off during the summer. There is less to do during the vacation period and the maintenance work is easy to do in mild temperatures.

Everything is far more difficult in the wintertime. Feser and Mauss have flushed the unit with nitrogen and burnt the surplus gas. Nevertheless, they could not rule out that water vapor may have accumulated somewhere in the kilometer-long system of pipes. And so they had to manually flush a large number of lines to prevent the pipes from bursting in freezing temperatures.

But what should the company do with the workers while the machines are idle? Feser and Mauss have talked with each one individually. They want to create as little anxiety as possible among the workforce. Fortunately, the surplus in personnel was not very obvious over Christmas and New Year's.

The works council has negotiated with company management that, for the time being, there will be no dismissals. "We're working off time credits, using up residual holiday entitlements and conducting training seminars," says plant manager Nick. "The overall situation isn't good, but the employees accept these measures." Eventually the crisis will pass, he says.

But it remains unclear when that will happen. BASF still has a buffer in its flexible working time accounts, a kind of credit line to bridge the crisis, but this is dwindling with each passing day.

"If the unit isn't running by this spring," says plant manager Nick in Ludwigshafen, "then we'll have a problem."

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