A piping project for a saltwater disposal facility in North Dakota was recently named one of the The Plastics Pipe Institute, Inc. (PPI) Projects of the Year.
For more than ten years, the association’s members have selected a Project of the Year and a Member of the Year for each of the five PPI divisions - Building and Construction, Drainage, Energy Piping Systems, Municipal and Industrial and Power and Communications. PPI is the major North American trade association representing the plastic pipe industry.
The association said that this year it received the most submissions, and that it was also the first year in a decade of the program’s existence to have multiple project winners in two divisions.
The North Dakota project, at the Crestwood Gondor Saltwater Disposal Facility, brought a high temperature saltwater disposal system to the Delaware basin that used more than 88,000 feet of 12-, 18- and 20-inch PE-RT HDPE. Because of the lack of infrastructure and a boom in drilling, a high number of trucks were required to transport the saltwater to the disposal units. The pipe network provided the way to move the salt water, typically between 140-180 °F. The high temperatures left the engineers with expensive options to cool the produced water, or to find a corrosion resistant pipe that could handle the temperatures. They identified Performance Pipe’s PlatinumStripe® 1800 Series Piping Products, manufactured using Dow INTREPID™ 2499 Polyethylene Raised Temperature (PE-RT & PE4710), as a viable solution.
Permitted to accept up to 50,000 barrels per day (b/d) of produced water, the Crestwood Gondor facility features two wells, two separators, two oil storage tanks, and 10 produced water storage tanks across nearly three acres. The project, which was constructed using both onsite installation and in shop fabrication, consisted of 12 inch and smaller HDPE pipe.
Selecting HDPE over metallic piping systems allowed Crestwood to complete the Gondor facility on time and within budget. Victaulic assisted with the design and fabrication of the Gondor project, cutting weeks off the original construction estimate. The HDPE couplings were installed with minimal effort, and onsite assembly required only simple hand tools, without the risk of weather delays. The Victaulic couplings eliminated challenging fitting-to-fitting connections, and vertical and overhead installation was quickly and easily accomplished.
Other winning PPI projects included the Florida installation of one of the largest horizontal directional drilling (HDD) of 54-inch diameter pipe, a new stormwater drainage system for a new soccer complex in Haiti plus the underground installation of electrical conduit to protect hot air balloons. Two PPI company members shared the honors for a new pedestrian bridge in Utah.
