An order worth more than $150 million (EUR 100 million) to upgrade the paint shop at BMW’s Spartanburg, S.C. facility was awarded to the Durr Group, Stuttgart, Germany.

Originally built by Durr in 1996, the BMW paint shop will be expanded so that the successors to the company’s popular X3 model -- the X5 and X6 models -- can be produced at the site in the future. The paint shop will be expanded by 80 percent.

Durr will build three new areas for the paint shop, including a base-coating facility with pretreatment, dip coating and drying, where the RoDip rotation dipping process will be used. Primer and top-coating lines with connected finishing and waxing lines for post-treatment and transport sealing are planned. Also, a sealing line for weld seams and underbody protection will be built. Production is expected to begin in the first two areas in mid-2009, and startup of the sealing line is planned for mid-2010. Capacity is expected to increase from the current 27 units per hour to 46.

The project in Spartanburg is the BMW Group’s third-largest plant remodeling job by Durr since 2003. Most recently, Durr expanded and modernized the paint shop at the BMW site in Oxford, England, where the Mini model is produced. In 2003, Durr remodeled the paint shop at the BMW site in Shenyang, China. In all three projects, Durr provided upstream planning of paint shop layout and processes as well as the equipment.