Spiecapag makes mark on pipeline history

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 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 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.

A lot of the projects Spiecapag has constructed have been delivered through joint ventures (JV) with other businesses. Is that also the way of the future?

Yes, and over the years, Spiecapag has long worked alongside JV partners - in Australia as much as internationally. Some JVs were formed to deliver a single project for clients, but many have created enduring partnerships, where we shared so much more than just project risks and rewards, but also long-term client relationships, skilled workers and indeed management.

The longest standing JV partner we had was Lucas Engineering and Construction, a relationship built over decades, which culminated in a marriage of the businesses a few years ago. And in doing so, we also added another very strong string to our bow with the arrival of our horizontal directional drilling (HDD) business, HDI Lucas, which has done many firsts, longests, and largests in the HDD world, both in Australia and overseas.

So yes, partnerships and joint ventures are definitely a big part of how we work today, and also part of our vision of the future. This way, we focus on being best in class at what Spiecapag does – pipelines and facilities – and we work hand-in-hand with partners who bring additional expertise so that our clients can deliver more complex projects while both reducing costs and having a simpler owner-contractor interface.

Some recent examples of those kinds of JVs include our recent project with Seymour Whyte to deliver the Mardi to Warnervale water pipeline project for the NSW Central Coast Council, and another with Menard to assist a large mining client on Lihir Island in PNG.

We saw that Spiecapag fielded a team in the Brisbane Marathon festival recently, John, and it’s not the first time. Can you tell us what that means to you?

At a personal level, I must confess that I love running. But that’s not the only reason we field a team in the marathon. Since we first ran in 2018, the Spiecapag team has raised over $30,000 for charities, including Mates in Construction and Motor Neuron Disease Queensland.

What’s more, every year, we see our partners and subbies getting involved and supporting the causes too, which shows great team spirit. Those worthy causes have really added purpose to the run for us - and there is the additional benefit of it being a great team-building exercise too, with a noticeable boost in camaraderie and drive to do better in the team.

And that drive to do better, to do good, has informed how we run the business. We have a very active Green Team in the business, which drives environmental improvements from all levels in the business and throughout our operations here in Australia and the region. That combines well with our parent Vinci Group’s research and development to reduce our carbon footprint, and means we look forward to a very bright future for the business. And we are not unique: so many other parts of the industry are doing the same, so we look forward to sharing those successes for constructing a better world together.

The Sydney to Newcastle pipeline was Spiecapag’s first project in Australia.

For more information visit www.spiecapag.com.au

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