WorldWide Drilling Resource

35 WorldWide Drilling Resource ® JULY 2014 One-of-a-Kind Pipeline Project Adapted from Information by Volvo Construction Equipment Alberta is known as the oil capital of Canada and accounts for 98% of the country’s entire production. The province contains most of Canada’s oil sands and much of its conventional oil reserves. One of Canada’s major pipeline companies, Surerus Pipeline, Inc. recent- ly won the Long Lake Kinosis project from Nexen Canada which has been producing crude oil from bitumen since 2009, and employs 3200 people world- wide. Long Lake is set to produce an esti- mated 72,000 barrels of oil per day and work is being done to increase its bitu- men production. The Long Lake Kinosis project in- cluded the installation of three pipelines. Two of these use thermal traced pipe-in- pipe (PIP) designed and provided by the French company, InTerPipe (ITP). The three-pipe configuration consists of one outbound hot fluids 16-inch pipe inside a 20-inch pipe to transport fluids from Kinosis to Long Lake; one 12-inch pipe inside a 16-inch pipe transporting boiler feed water from Long Lake to Kinosis (known as the recovery line); and one standard oil pipe. Each pipe runs about 6 miles in length. For this method, insulated pipe is required to be custom fabricated and assembled on-site or at ITP’s facility so the pipeline can be pieced together. Surerus built a new 30,000-square-foot building in Gibbons, Alberta, just to assemble pipes for this $6.1 bi l l ion project. PIP lines are twice as heavy as traditional lines and cannot be bent or roped in the traditional way, so the trench has to be much deeper in some places. Surerus used a Volvo Construction Equipment EC700C excavator to perform this task. A number of Volvo pipelayers were also used including the PL3005D, PL4608, and PL4611. The Kinosis project is one-of-a-kind in North America as it is the first time PIP technology has been used exclusively for land-based pipeline. By this fall, oil is expected to be flowing through the new pipeline system. If work goes according to plan, this technology could become the most popular method for extracting and transporting heavy oil and gas in the region.