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Cross-Country Challenge

Trinidad may be a tropical paradise, but it's no easy place to build a pipeline.

By John Altdorfer
Photographs by Terry Lowenthal/Bechtel

Trinidad isn’t much larger than Rhode Island, the smallest of the United States. Yet this Caribbean island, nestled just off the coast of Venezuela, looms large as a major supplier of liquefied natural gas. Already responsible for 75 percent of U.S. LNG imports, Trinidad is gearing up for an expected 30 percent increase in the American market during the next two decades.

To meet that demand, Bechtel is building an underground pipeline to carry natural gas west across 77 kilometers of tropical rain forests, swamps, rolling hills, sugarcane fields, rivers, roads, and villages from the island’s southeastern shore to the liquefied natural gas processing plant in Point Fortin, also a Bechtel project.

The pipeline project, which began a year and a half ago, has presented challenges that included a seven-month wet season along with snakes, scorpions, and Africanized honeybees. Still, thanks to a workforce of more than 1,000 employees, the undertaking is headed for completion this September, in time to support the start-up of Atlantic LNG’s Train 4.

Bechtel knows all about building pipelines under difficult conditions. In the Sahara Desert, for example, blinding sandstorms and withering heat posed a unique set of problems during construction of the In Salah pipeline. Yet Bechtel crews could lay two to three kilometers of pipeline a day under the barren landscape of central Algeria—a place described by some as hotter than the sun and more desolate than the moon. In the ecologically diverse environment of Trinidad, progress is slower.

“Everything is wide open in the desert,” says Bechtel Project Manager Rich Alger. “There are no towns or forests or other obstacles to work around. But on Trinidad, we consider it a good day of work when we lay a half-kilometer of pipe.”

Starting on Trinidad’s relatively undeveloped and lightly populated eastern shore, workers deal with rolling hills, lush vegetation, and densely wooded forests. As a result, the project becomes a timber operation as crews clear trees, grade hillsides, and restore completed work sites. In swampy areas, teams use heavy-duty crane mats to provide solid footing for heavy equipment. They must also coat pipes with 15 centimeters of concrete so that they won’t float during the rainy season. Then, about halfway across the island, everything changes as villages, farms, businesses, and other signs of civilization appear more frequently.

“Once we reach the populated areas,” says Alger, “the project becomes a cautious exercise in avoiding as many houses, buildings, and farms as possible. Plus, we make every effort to avoid shutting down highways or creating traffic delays when we have to cut through roads.”

Despite all the earthbound predicaments, the biggest construction problem literally drops from the skies. From June through December, torrential rains drench Trinidad, soaking the island with 200 centimeters of precipitation. When the downpours start, work bogs down.

“When ground gets saturated, the mud will just swallow up heavy equipment,” says Assistant Project Manager Marcus Hood. “We cover the ground with wooden mats to provide a stable surface, and even then digging a ditch and lowering the pipe can be nearly impossible.”

Despite thorough planning for the wet season, heavier-than-normal rainfall in 2004 and an unexpectedly wet January in 2005 created so many delays that Bechtel assembled a complete second work crew to make up for lost time.

“Record rain last year and this year washed out weeks and weeks of work, but our completion deadline is still the same,” says Hood. “That means we have twice as much to do in half the time. To meet our deadline, we split the project in two sections and brought in additional employees to work on the eastern and western sections of the pipeline.”

Crews are simultaneously assembling the system in two separate “spreads.” Starting at Point Fortin, Spread 1 will eventually hook up at kilometer 42 with Spread 2, which continues to the end. Construction Manager Mel Trammell, who oversees work on Spread 1, explains that existing underground pipelines running parallel to the Bechtel project pose special concerns.

“In some cases, our line is only four and a half meters away, center to center, from other gas, oil, and water lines that were installed years ago by other companies. We have to be careful not to disturb them,” he says. “To install our pipe we need to dig a ditch about three meters deep. For a ditch that deep we have to slope the sides back far enough that they don’t collapse on themselves. But at the same time, if we slope them too much, there’s a chance that we could cause the dirt to shift and expose the existing lines.”

Careful planning and even more careful execution, such as placing all heavy equipment in areas where no pipelines are buried, is helping to keep all the lines and bases covered.

With completion approaching, Alger is proud of the accomplishments. “We’ve had to deal with some unusual and unexpected challenges, but our crews adapted well,” he says. “In addition, we’ve provided jobs and skills for a thousand local workers who can move on to other projects when they’re finished here.

“They’re finding reserves of natural gas here faster than they can be processed. The pipeline will help Trinidad play a bigger role as a major natural gas supplier to the United States and other countries for a long time.”