Kewazo at Downstream USA 2026 in Houston
Reuters Events Downstream USA 2026 takes place Wednesday July 15 and Thursday July 16 at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston. Sessions focus on plant profitability, reliability, and the real-world strategies operators are using to cut costs and improve performance. The room draws around 3,000 plant managers and engineers from refining, petrochemical, LNG, and chemical operations, including teams from Marathon Petroleum, Motiva, Phillips 66, Chevron, Dow, BASF, Celanese, bp, and Oxy.
Heitor Gartner, Simon Espinosa, and Artem Kuchukov from Kewazo will be at Booth 633 for both days.
What LIFTBOT brings to the turnaround cost conversation
Kewazo’s active customer base is built from the same companies in the same room. The Gulf Coast holds the highest concentration of refinery and petrochemical capacity in North America, which makes it the center of gravity for turnaround activity on the continent. Kewazo’s work covers turnaround and capital project scaffold at refineries, petrochemical plants, and chemical facilities in this region.
LIFTBOT is Kewazo’s robotic scaffold material-handling system, a battery-powered lifting unit for vertical material movement during scaffold erection and dismantling. Certified to 165 ft (50 m) and rated for 8,000+ lbs of material per day, it replaces the crane, the manual carry, or both. UL and CSA certified for the North American market.
Results from real turnaround deployments
In a three-month pre-turnaround deployment with Chevron, three LIFTBOT units eliminated $988,000 in crane rental and associated labor costs across flares, furnace, and column work. The same deployment removed 6,110 hazardous man-hours from scope, hours that would otherwise have put workers in the line of fire. The full Chevron case study has the detailed breakdown by scope.
LIFTBOT is operational in roughly 20 minutes from site arrival. No separate crane, no separate fuel supply, no separately certified operator. The crew that builds the scaffold runs it. LIFTBOT feeds operational data into ONSITE, Kewazo’s field analytics platform, logging lift cycles, material throughput, time per load, and utilisation rates across the deployment. For sites where lifting activity was previously untracked, this gives contractors and plant operators a documented record of project performance.
Meet the Kewazo team at the conference
If you are planning a turnaround in 2026 or 2027 and want to understand what robotic material handling would mean for your schedule, crew size, or safety performance, stop by Booth 633. If you are not in Houston but the turnaround cost question applies to your site, the contact page is the fastest way to reach out.
