PROJECTS
Spiecapag makes its mark on Australian pipeline history
The Spiecapag team on the Eastern Goldfields Pipeline project.
In 2023, Spiecapag celebrates 100 years of pipeline heritage, and this year, the company has been celebrating the earliest of the projects it worked on over the 40 years since it first trenched, blasted and horizontally drilled pipelines in Australia. The Australian Pipeliner sat down with Spiecapag’s Managing Director John Walsh to talk about some of the biggest milestones over those 40 years in Australia and Papua New Guinea. Can you give us some of the highlights across projects Spiecapag has worked on in this region over the past 40 years? JW: Sure. This year we mark 40 years of the Sydney to Newcastle pipeline. The project is memorable as our first project in Australia, and one of the innovations on that project was in minimising the environmental impacts on the Hawkesbury River crossing. And there were lots of other crossings: tunnels, minor river crossings, highway crossings, road crossings and even cattle track crossings. Many working on the project will remember the rocky sections and some of those steep sections with large boulders to be avoided – and labour activism. And so Spiecapag’s work in Australia had started. Moving on a decade, perhaps the most
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memorable project of the 1990s was the Tenneco pipeline (South West Queensland Pipeline), with its 756 km of cross-country pipeline, including hundreds of km of hard rock. It bears some similarities to SEA Gas, which at 687 km, was another long-distance pipeline, constructed in the early 2000s. Additional client demand for gas meant that 340 km of the SEA Gas pipeline was expanded during construction to install twin 14-inch (355 mm) diameter pipelines, and that was a project where we were the EPC. Both these projects were true tests of our ability to get the logistics for our remote operations right, and great examples of the importance of working with local traditional landowners to protect cultural heritage. The 2000s brought the second of our projects in PNG, following Kutubu in the 1990s – the The Australian Pipeliner | October 2021
more than 600 km of large diameter pipelines for the ExxonMobil-led PNG-LNG project. This was a monumental test of our logistics and of operating in harsh, variable conditions. Perhaps an enduring upside of those projects is that it seems everybody in PNG knows how to pronounce Spiecapag (no need for our “Speecah-pag” mugs there!). And very soon after that project was commissioned, we started work on the Eastern Goldfields Pipeline for APA Group – the first of many projects for APA. At 293 km, it might have been shorter than the others I’ve mentioned, but 12 hours northeast of Perth, it was really remote. Again, logistics played a key role in delivering ahead of schedule (maintaining a LTIFR of 0), by supporting production of an average of 5 km/day with a single spread, and like so often, a very rapid mobilisation.
