The NWR Sturgeon Refinery Gasifier provided a unique challenge for our pipe fabrication facility. Initial fabrication was done overseas before being shipped to Canada, and our team was responsible for unloading the subassembly pipe spools and turning them into the larger, full-sized spools to be sent to the refinery site.

Thanks to our large fabrication facility and our adjacent module yard, PCL had the capacity and infrastructure necessary to tackle this task, and this non-traditional style of pipe fabrication also required the shop to be retooled and the facility layout reset to accommodate the spool assembly. Because we could transfer the welding work to the shop instead of doing it in the field, the work was done more efficiently and at a lower cost to the owner.

Roughly a third of the 9,133 smaller spools that were delivered to PCL had deficiencies in code, specification or dimension, and we took on the task of reworking these spools to meet the needs of NWR. While the volume of repairs slowed the spool assembly overall, the holistic approach taken by our teams in both the field and the shop allowed us to prioritize repairs on essential spools and strategically deliver them to site to facilitate installations there.

Overall, the pipe assembly program took 13,891 welds off site and into the shop environment, producing over 5,000 completed spools.