World's Largest MTO Reactor Was Successfully Lifted by Wison Engineering Refreshed the Industry Record

On March 22, 2025, Wison Engineering successfully lifted the world's largest MTO reactor precisely and installed it on top of the equipment in the 1 million tons/year methanol to olefin (MTO) project of Guangxi Huayi Energy & Chemical Co., Ltd. marking key progress in the construction of the project and laying a solid foundation for the smooth advancement of the subsequent projects.

As the core equipment of the project, the reactor has a diameter of 10.8m, a length of 45.28m, and a total weight of 900 tons, which is huge in volume and complex in structure, and puts forward extremely high requirements for lifting technology and safety. To ensure the smooth implementation of the lifting work, the project team started preparations several months in advance, organized the company's experts and industry authorities to carry out several rounds of demonstration of the overall lifting scheme, focusing on the transport routes, crane selection, crane stations and lifting paths and other key aspects of the development of a detailed and thorough implementation plan. At the same time, the team strictly by safety standards, all lifting equipment and tools for systematic inspection and debugging, to ensure that the operations are in line with high standards and high reliability of the safety requirements.

The reactor was manufactured using an innovative horizontal assembly process, which shortened the overall construction period from 11 to 13 months to 7 months compared with the traditional piece-by-piece assembly method. In the transport phase, facing the challenge of transporting the equipment with a width of 13 meters and a height of 15 meters due to the outreach of the pipe opening, the project team planned the transport route accurately and finally passed through the 15-meter height-restricted pipe gallery truss with a safety margin of only 5 centimeters, which guaranteed the safety and efficiency of the transport. During the on-site construction, the 2,000-ton main crane and the 600-ton auxiliary crane successfully achieved one-time accurate lifting in place after 5 hours of coordinated operation.

The hoisted core reactor has achieved three major technological breakthroughs in the field of global MTO equipment construction: the first time to complete the factory integrated manufacturing of cyclone separation system and reactor shell; the first time to complete the factory pre-assembly of 16 sets of cyclone separator and liner components with millimeter assembly precision; the first time to adopt the construction scheme of integral transport and single lifting, which will shorten the on-site installation time by nearly 40% and significantly reduced the risk of overhead operation.

The successful lifting of the reactor is an important milestone in the construction process of the project, which not only shows the excellent technical strength and strong execution ability of the project team but also embodies the team spirit of close collaboration and overcoming the difficulties of all parties. The achievement of this result is inseparable from the full cooperation and strong support of the owner team, supervision team, and construction team.

 Relying on Wison Engineering's profound accumulation in modular design, manufacturing, and implementation, this project fully adopts the factory prefabrication construction mode, which moves the installation of complex internal parts. It traditionally requires to be completed at the site to the manufacturing workshop to complete with high precision. Thus, it significantly improves the construction efficiency and quality control level. The successful lifting of the reactor not only marks a breakthrough in the manufacturing and installing large-scale chemical equipment in China but also provides a replicable and promotable demonstration sample for the construction of subsequent MTO plants.

In the future, the project team will continue to uphold a rigorous and pragmatic work style, steadily promote the subsequent construction tasks, strict quality control, grasp the progress, and strive to build a high-quality engineering and benchmarking project.