A complete of 13,000 folks have been employed since development began. On the finish of Could, the mission alone accounted for 9,000 employees in Alberta and B.C. About 1,900 are concentrated within the Decrease Mainland, with a lot of that manpower centered on expansions of the Burnaby tank farm and Westridge Marine Terminal.
The pipeline twinning mission is damaged into 9 sections or “spreads.” Unfold 1 out of Edmonton is 94% full, whereas work on the Fraser Valley – Unfold 6 – hasn’t even began but, as the corporate remains to be ready for the Canadian Power Regulator to challenge permits from detailed route hearings.
It’ll add a second pipeline to the prevailing one, which runs from Edmonton to Burnaby, rising its capability to 890,000 barrels per day from 300,000
A lot of the work is being finished by Canadian contractors, though there are a number of factors alongside the pipeline’s route that pose some engineering, geotechnical and development challenges that require experience not present in Canada.
Burying a pipeline within the steep mountainous terrain between Hope and the Coquihalla Summit, for instance, requires worldwide technical experience and specialised gear. For that part, Trans Mountain has contracted Kiewit and an Italian firm, Bonatti.
“We’re working grades of 30 levels up there,” mentioned Dean Palin, head mission director for the TMX mission. “So we introduced in Kiewit Bonatti Group to assist us get via the steep slopes on that piece of it.”
Trans Mountain additionally introduced in specialised marine barge-crane operators from the U.S. to work on the foreshore of Westridge Marine terminal.
One of many greater engineering challenges is boring a 2.6-kilometre tunnel via Burnaby Mountain. A serious milestone within the mission’s development was achieved Could 26, when tunnel boring formally started. The tunnel is required to attach the Burnaby tank farm and Westridge Marine Terminal with distribution traces.
The Burnaby tank farm is being expanded with 14 extra storage tanks. The Westridge Marine terminal, the place oil is loaded onto tankers for export, includes the development of three new berths. This requires the set up of 162 piles, and all of this needs to be finished within the water across the terminal with out interfering with ongoing operations.
The marine terminal and tank farm are greater than two kilometres aside and are linked by distribution pipes that have been initially put underground within the Fifties. Since then, the Metropolis of Burnaby has constructed up round that space. So relatively than tear up metropolis streets to put in new distribution pipes to attach the Burnaby tank farm and Westridge Marine Terminal, planners determined to bore the lengthy tunnel via Burnaby Mountain.
The tunnel boring took a yr of preparatory work and 6 years of planning, design and regulatory approvals. The prep work included constructing entrance and exit portals at both finish, which required the development of retaining partitions on the Burnaby tank farm and Westridge Marine Terminal.
This concerned 106 secant piles being sunk 18 metres deep into the bottom on the marine terminal finish. About 300,000 cubic metres of soil then needed to be excavated in entrance of those piles to disclose the brand new retaining partitions, after which a platform was constructed for the tunnel boring machine. One other small retaining wall was constructed on the Burnaby Tank farm finish.
The boring started with slicing a 4.4-metre entrance into the brand new retaining wall close to Westridge Marine Terminal.
Chewing via a mountain requires specialised equipment. A custom-built tunnel boring machine was constructed by Herrenknecht AG in Germany at a value of about C$10 million. The machine is 122 metres lengthy – the size of a soccer discipline – and is operated by a crew of 12, who work contained in the machine.
The machine operates seven days per week, 24 hours a day. It’ll take about 290 days to finish the tunnel. As of the tip of June, solely about 25 metres of the tunnel had been excavated.
“Proper now, we’re not transferring very quick, as a result of as we slowly begin to wind this machine up, we’ve obtained commissioning that’s ongoing, ensuring every little thing’s proper earlier than we get too far into the tunnel,” Palin mentioned.
The enlargement mission has suffered various delays and stop-work orders. Among the delays have been because of the pandemic, however there was additionally a three-week halt-work order issued by Trans Mountain in December, after various office accidents, together with one fatality.
“It’s such an enormous mission, and we’ve had some challenges,” Hounsell mentioned. “We had a clearing stop-work order a short time in the past. Covid clearly has been a problem in many alternative methods, however in another methods we catch up. Total, we’re nonetheless projecting for completion on the finish of 2022.”
(This text first appeared in Business in Vancouver)
