Articles

When Brian Simon, a project manager at Grace-Titan DVBE (based in Redding, California) first looked at the Potter Valley Bypass job it looked difficult, but straightforward. Grace-Titan was being asked to remove a section of the penstock that supplies Pacific Gas & Electric's (PGE) Potter Valley hydroelectric plant and install a Y-branch. But that meant that the five-foot diameter penstock had to be shut down temporarily... and that's where things got complicated. The penstock and the gate valve...

Steam & Process Repairs, founded in 1978 and based in Gonzales, Louisiana, primarily serves chemical plants, refineries, and offshore drilling operations with a variety of advanced line repair technologies, including hot tapping, line freezing, and on-stream leak sealing. In 2020, Steam & Process contracted to replace seawater intake valves in a fleet of 16 drillships, vessels designed to conduct exploratory offshore drilling of new wells, and to support offshore crews in a variety of situations...

Innovator Industrial Services is the fastest growing specialty services provider in Canada, offering the “specialty maintenance and construction services required in maintaining high temperature and high pressure piping systems.” As the name implies, the firm emphasizes innovative, cost-effective solutions for the unique challenges posed by the complexities of pipe arrays in oil refineries, manufacturing facilities, and other large plants and factories.

Innovation is desperately needed...

Providenciales, known as ‘Provo’ to locals, is one of the Turks and Caicos Islands, and is noted for the exceptional beauty of its many north shore resorts—in 2011, TripAdvisor rated Providenciales as the best “beach destination” in the entire world. And one of those destinations is Bajacu, a hilltop villa designed by famous Mexican architect Marco Aldaco.
Bajacu’s south shore location is unusual for Provo. Villa Manager Alanzo Barnett explains why. “Unlike the north shore, there really aren’t...

Furmanite, the international plant and pipeline maintenance firm, is big enough, experienced enough, and innovative enough to have developed multiple specialties focused on the demanding task of repairing and rehabilitating critical plant and refinery processes while minimizing downtime, or avoiding it altogether. One such specialty is bag stopping, where custom-made bags or plugs are inserted into pipelines while deflated, and inflated with air, water, or various gases at sufficient pressure to...

Angola LNG, a $9 billion liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant at the mouth of the Congo River in Angola’s oil producing Soyo region, is one of the world’s largest and most modern LNG processing facilities, with capacity to produce up to 5.2 million tons annually. It’s distinct from many such plants as it is supplied primarily by associated gas from nearby oil fields, thus producing LNG sustainably and significantly reducing gas flaring.

But there have been challenges to production, including...

An innovative use of a Petersen Annular Seal in an extreme environment—almost one hundred feet down in the Gulf of Mexico—is interesting proof that the technology is effective in a great variety of situations, including those commonly found in municipal and industrial sewer and pipe networks.

"We used the seal as part of a life extension program for a tension leg platform set in over 3,200 FSW (feet of saltwater)," says Phoenix International Holdings Inc. (PIH) Dive & Welding Supervisor...

The Foster Creek Project began life as a Cenovus Energy oil sand pilot project, and the company is proud of it. Their website says: 

“Foster Creek is located about 330 kilometres northeast of Edmonton, Alberta on the Cold Lake Air Weapons Range—an active Canadian military base. The oil at Foster Creek sits about 450 metres below the surface—so deep that we have to use technology called steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD), to drill and pump the oil to the surface. Foster Creek...

Some of the world's most intricate infrastructure is found in power plants, chemical plants, refineries, and other factories that use and combine industrial chemicals. The piping for fuel, chemical transport, water supply, and cooling needs is typically very complex and subject to high temperatures and pressures. And since plants are harsh environments, it's a given that piping needs regular maintenance, repair, and rerouting. But shutting down entire lines is often considered an impossibility: practical...

Energy Northwest in Washington State had an underground 72” water line operating at 28 psi. 
The pipeline needed to be plugged to replace a valve on the downstream side. The 72” pipe was 
excavated and a 72” X 36” Tapping Sleeve was installed on the pipe. A Hot Tap Machine was 
utilized to make a 36” Hot Tap through a 36” line and a Petersen® PeteStop®...

Oil refineries are difficult, high stress environments and it is not at all uncommon for critical maintenance to take place while plant operations continue… even in areas immediately adjacent to repair work. The stakes are high: after all, shutdowns are expensive and can affect supply lines in other plants and industries… so plant operators will go to great lengths to keep units running, even while repairs take place.

TEAM Industrial Services, Inc. (TEAM) specializes in this type of work...

Failing sanitary sewer lines can often be repaired with conventional methods—especially in residential areas there are usually plenty of options for isolation and rerouting. But it was a different scenario in a recent failure near Chicago; a cracked 24-inch steel pipe sewer main was close to a lift station in a congested, very active industrial area. The main served a large steel mill and a chemical plant that couldn’t afford downtime. So the cracked and failing pipe had to be repaired quickly in...

Project scope summary: Install a 124-060 plug configured as a Grout Bag into a 60” lake water pipeline through an 18” X 18” cut hole in the top of the pipeline. Water head was a few inches above the top of the horizontal pipe.

The grout bag used had two ports centered on one end. The 1” npt pressure monitoring and discharge port connected to a 1” internal buoyant hose extending ½ the deflated length of the plug. The other port was a 1 ¼”npt for inflation and grout filling and did...

With a population of about 140,000, Hollywood is Florida’s twelfth largest city. Most of its growth took place in the 1950s and 1960s and so, like many cities, Hollywood is now coping with a legacy of aging, and in some cases, crumbling infrastructure. A good example is the city’s gravity-fed main sewer transmission line, 6,000 feet of 60-inch diameter lined concrete. “Mostly there was a lot of failure and erosion at the bottom, plus failing joints and infiltration around manholes,” says Underground...