To Mr. Sanjeev Koul.

I read your posts with interest. I have been involved in laying over 9,000 miles of pipelines on five continents in the last 52-years. I have worked as a spread engineer (for the contractors’ planning), as a pipeline bending engineer/bending foreman, as a pipeline superintendent and as a pipeline consultant.

Could you supply the following information?
What country and area of that country is the job in?
What is the expected weather?
What are the different pipe thicknesses?
What pipe yield-X-65 (?), X-70(?) or X-80(?) or what?
Does the contractor have a choice of welding procedures-Manual (stick rod or Semiautomatic-maybe a combination of both) or pure automatic?
Have you figured in two double-jointing yards? This is dependent on conditions (and widths) of roads to allow 24 meters to be hauled? Weight capabilities and weigh limits of bridges are also a consideration.
Also running double-jointing yards assumes there will be a timely supply of single length joints to the yards.
Can you estimate what per cent of total job are flat or rolling hills, swamps, sand or sand dunes, land requiring de-watering, sharp hills and mountains?
What percent is normal dirt (easily cut by excavators or wheel trenchers), soft rock (like sandstone, sedimentary rock) or aggregate rock (like American caliche or African Laterite) or very hard rock (like granite, chert)?
What is the countryside like? Open, deserts, farmers fields, lightly forested, heavily forested, rice fields, swamps or rainforest and jungles?
What type of coating will be used?

Some points: Automatic welding would be my first choice. These pipe gangs can make more (and better) welds, per day, than a stick or semiautomatic crew. That is with a lower number of welders. They are expensive to rent the automatic welding equipment and to run due to a greater number of men in the crew. There is a lot more equipment (and operators) on the right-of-way. There are pipe facing- machine carrier side booms and many more Pay welder machines.

We did 1,000 kilometers of 40-inch crude oil line across Turkey out of Iraq in 1975& 1976. We used only one spread (or you might say a “Super Spread). The pipe was hauled from the Mediterranean Sea port to various stock piles near road crossings by 100 cab-over Daf stringing trucks. Pipe was loaded on off-road trailers that were pulled by dozers, big front loaders and ex-Swiss Army 6x6 trucks down the right-of-way... The stringing crew ran day and night (with special lighting) and could get on an average of 1,000 single pipes strung in 24 hours.

The welding crews, of which there were three on one spread, could weld an average of 450-40-inch welds daily (if every thing worked well, with no major breakdowns of welding gear). I ran two bending crews, with one running 24-hours a day (with special lighting) and one running 16 hours a day. All crews worked seven 16-hour days, counting travel times.

The biggest pipe I have been involved with was a 400-kilometer of 48” job in Southern Mexico. There may be some differences in laying 56-inch pipe, compared to 48-inch.pipe

I have good friend that has many years of experience in laying 56-inch pipelines. I will ask him how he would rig this up as far as number of spreads, equipment in each crew, etc. My thoughts would be by using 2 Super Spreads for the 690 kilometers, with the use of two double jointing yards. One should put two bending machines on each spread. That would be a total of 4 bending machines and 8 big (cat 594 or Cat 589 pipelayers or Komatsu D-355 or Converted-to-side boom, dozers- Komatsu D-375 pipelayers.

I would rig up two pipe gangs on each spread... If any other crew needs more equipment or people to stay ahead, it can be easily added. Instead of running 4 spreads with the need to have multiple camps for each spread, these cuts down the cost of buying them and the bother of moving them.

There are several pieces of equipment new on the market, but not too well known. If you will send me an e-mail to ben.robertson@sbcglobal.net, I will attach the details of some of them, in a return e-mail.

For instance, there is a new Multi Ripper excavator bucket (several models) that can break up and remove rock from the trench. It makes 4 to 5 times more progress than a hydraulic rock pick, each day and sometimes eliminates the need for an expensive rock saw trencher (and eliminates the hassle of moving each) or rock blasting.

Regards,
..
Ben

SANJEEV,

The productivity norms must be available with your company if they are in the business. Do not hesitae to ask for it as this will save lots of time for you.

Once you have it the steps for planning are as follows.

1) The number of teams to work simultaneously shall be calculated based on your companies productivity norms and the schedule.

2) Study the route of pippeline. It is recommnded to choose all town/habitataed location for setting up of base camps.

3) The distance between spreads must be optimized to minimize transportation time and the effort in setting-up a base camp.

4) The method generally followed is that say we start form point A and move upto 50 km forward then the next camp shall be 100 km from A as to cover 50 km forward and 50 km backward.

5) I am not sure about your pipeline sub-contract but it is recommended to have different stretch for both these sub-contractors to avoid conflict.


Hope the above are useful to you.


Regards,


Ashraf