TGS team ends critical stage for pipeline conclusion

The South Gas Consortium, formed by Tenenge and OEC, concluded, on March 24 last, the largest maritime Horizontal Directional Drilling (HDD) in South America, in Babitonga Bay, Santa Catarina.

The operation, also called shore approach, started on March 17, when a column of pipes approximately 1,667 meters long was moved from the city of Itapoá and launched out to sea in the bay. To ensure the safety of the activity, the navigation channel was closed and the entire operation went according to plan.

The pull-back operation (pulling the pipe column from sea to land) was successfully completed in the early evening of March 24, when 1,492 meters of the column returned through the largest subsea HDD ever made in Brazil. The final operation involved 156 people, rafts and support boats and took a total of 76 hours.

This milestone is extremely important for the conclusion of the works at the Terminal Gás Sul, since it was the most critical phase of the entire project. According to Marco Aurélio Barros, Contract Director, the completion of the HDD gives us greater security to carry out the final stages of the project. “Now we will focus on the completion of the subsea pipeline by towing methodology (pipeline column sinking), hydrostatic test and commissioning”, he says.

TGS

The Terminal Gás Sul will supply 15 million cubic meters of Natural Gas per day, representing an increase of more than three times the total currently supply available in the state of Santa Catarina. The Terminal is located 300 meters off the coast of the city of São Francisco do Sul, and includes infrastructure to receive, store, regasify, and distribute natural gas, which will arrive as LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) from the sea via methane carriers and will be transferred ship-to-ship to a FSRU (floating storage and regasification unit) with the capacity to store 160,000 cubic meters of LNG, which, in turn, will be interconnected by 33 km of 20-inch pipelines through the GASBOL (Bolivia-Brazil gas pipeline).