How to Sell Into Louisiana Turnarounds in 2027: The 18 Month Procurement Window

How to sell into Louisiana turnarounds is, at its core, a timing question. A turnaround · the planned shutdown of a process unit for inspection, repair, catalyst change, and equipment replacement · is bought on a schedule that begins long before the unit comes down. For the 2027 season at facilities such as Marathon Garyville, ExxonMobil Baton Rouge, CITGO Lake Charles, and Shell Norco, the procurement window is already open in 2026, and vendors who treat a 2027 event as a 2027 opportunity tend to arrive after the consequential decisions have been made.

At Louisiana facilities from CITGO Lake Charles to Marathon Garyville, turnaround procurement runs in three broad phases, and each phase buys different things from different people.

Turnaround planners and unit engineers build the work list: which exchanger bundles come out, which valves are replaced, which rotating equipment is overhauled, which inspection findings from the last run have to be addressed. Long lead materials · alloy exchanger bundles, specialty valves, engineered rotating equipment components · are identified and often ordered during this phase, because fabrication lead times will not fit inside a shorter window. The scope freeze · the milestone after which new work is not added to the plan without senior approval · usually closes this phase. Vendors who first appear after scope freeze are selling into a list that is already written.

Marathon Garyville, at 597,000 barrels per calendar day per EIA, is the largest refinery in Louisiana and the fourth largest in the United States. No 2027 turnaround at Garyville is confirmed. What is confirmed, per Marathon's fourth quarter 2025 earnings, is a pair of capital projects · a feedstock optimization raising crude rates by about 30,000 barrels per day and a product export flexibility project · both targeted online by year end 2027. As cycle inference, startups of that kind create tie in and integration outage windows, and the Garyville Major Expansion units last began a full turnaround cycle in Q1 2017. The reasoning is laid out in the Marathon Garyville 2027 outlook; it is an inference with a stated basis, not a schedule. Vendors building coverage of Marathon Petroleum in 2026 are working the front half of the window either way.

ExxonMobil Baton Rouge, at 522,500 barrels per calendar day per EIA the sixth largest refinery in the United States, is an integrated refining and chemical complex. A 2027 maintenance window there is a staggered cycle inference at medium to low confidence · ExxonMobil's reported 2026 turnaround activity concentrated at Beaumont · and it deserves to be framed exactly that way.

Commercial planning context

Execution considerations

CITGO Lake Charles, which the company currently states at 479,000 barrels per day, ran a multi unit turnaround from late February to late April 2024 covering the roughly 50,000 barrel per day FCC-A, two reformers, a naphtha hydrotreater, and Crude Topper C, one of four crude trains, per Bloomberg and trade reports. Trade reporting also indicates CITGO deferred further Lake Charles turnaround work into 2026 during a strong margin period, and ExecGraph tracking lists a possible Q4 2026 event. On a 4 to 6 year unit cycle, the units that ran in 2024 point at the late 2020s; the deferred work points nearer.

Shell Norco began a roughly 50 day turnaround on August 15, 2025 covering the RCCU, or residual catalytic cracking unit, the 14,800 barrel per day alkylation unit, the 40,000 barrel per day naphtha hydrotreater, and the GO-1 ethylene unit, per Reuters. Activity on the Norco chemicals side into 2027 is an inference drawn from independent chemical unit cycles, not a confirmed event.

Worked backward, a fall 2027 Louisiana event puts scope development in late 2025 through 2026, RFQs from late 2026 into spring 2027, and mobilization in the summer of 2027. Kpler, in February 2026, framed a heavier US maintenance cycle building through the second half of 2026 into 2027 on 4 to 5 year cycles, which tightens fabrication capacity and craft availability at exactly the moment those RFQs land. Vendors who engage during scope development tend to be the vendors the RFQ list is built around.