Well, it’s the dead of winter for some of you reading this and some, well, not so much. Recently, I undertook a task to assist a fellow designer in establishing an oxygen supply for a new hospital/clinic on a tiny little island out in the Pacific Ocean.

Another small clinic on the island receives approximately 144 size H cylinders daily for its oxygen supply. Yes, that’s correct: 144 H cylinders a day. 

Wow! That was all I could say. After the initial shock wore off, I started researching for any information on who was supplying the cylinders and whether they could do anything bigger.

As I dug into finding a supplier and manufacturer, I found a supplier that could serve the little island from a larger nearby island. 

The anticipated load for oxygen per month was estimated at around 19,500 standard cubic feet (scf). This is not a lot, but too much to do with cylinders, so we started looking at using other methods.

We settled on the on-site microbulk system from Chart Industries — the Cryogenic Perma-CYL 450HP AS. This is a 450-liter storage vessel with a loss rate of 1.12% per day. With two of these 450s on site, the estimated loss would be around 265 scf per day if the facility was not using enough oxygen. If we use more than that a day, we will avoid having a blow-off occur. The old saying is that if you’re not using it, you’re losing it.

After everything was ironed out with what tank and how many, we needed to discuss logistics.

Being a tiny remote island, how does it get bottled supplies? Come to find out, a ferry comes to the island once a week and brings bottled gas supplies.

With bottles arriving every week, does the current provider have the larger tanks we sought? The answer was no. We did find a vendor who could provide us with what we needed. 

They could provide us with two Chart 450HP Perma CYL tanks. These tanks come filled and require a forklift to move them out and put a new one into place every three to six weeks. 

They would need to ship the containers to a neighboring island, where the tanks would be transferred to the ferry to take them to the smaller island. 

We figured that we could go through 20 tanks in a year, which is far better than 144 H cylinders a day. 

By now, I figure you might be wondering why we did not consider using an oxygen concentrator plant for the facility. 

We did consider it, as we could supply the other facility with its 144 bottles a day and recoup some of the cost.

As we walked through all the pros and cons, the one we kept coming back to as a long-term issue, which could cause more headaches down the road than expected, was the salty sea air, which is very hard on equipment. 

So, we felt the better overall solution was the two 450 tanks. 

The discussion moved on to how to get the tanks from the ferry over to the facility and into place. 

They would load them on a flatbed trailer with railings which could be removed to get a forklift under the vessels and move them off and over to the pad, where they will sit for three weeks. 

Another question we had: What if a mishap occurred with moving the tank? Has this happened? If so, how often does this occur? 

There was no frequency to put a finger on, but it has happened. 

We are still working through this problem, but considering placing a cylinder x cylinder manifold with a day’s worth of storage adjacent to the two 450 tanks as a precautionary measure if a mishap occurs.

This way, if one tank is down and out of commission, we still have a day’s worth of backup on-site.

The other possibility is the hospital may not use enough oxygen to warrant the two large tanks; we could either reduce the two tanks down a size or remove one tank and keep the cylinder manifold in place as the reserve. 

Flexibility is built into the system; as the facility grows or stays the same, it can decide to adjust its tank needs with ease.

When developing a new facility’s oxygen needs, dig in, ask questions and do your research to find the best possible solution. There is more than one solution, but find the one that works best for the client.