The American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC) Louisiana chapter has named the Aethon, Sligo to Wiggins Pipeline Route Analysis project an Honor Award winner. The award will be presented on March 25, 2021, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Aethon was interested in connecting their Sligo pipeline with their Wiggins Facility to distribute natural gas between facilities and create more system flexibility. Due to the configurations of the systems, Aethon was considering tying into five different points along their Sligo pipeline. Each of these locations had benefits and challenges to generate a route to the Wiggins Facility.
HGA’s pipeline routing team utilized our RouteNAV routing analysis process to evaluate various paths between the five potential tie-in locations and the Wiggins Facility pipeline and determine a preferred route for each of the tie-in locations. These five routes were then further evaluated from an operations standpoint to determine the most beneficial route for the system as a whole.
This effort was completed within three weeks, which is a fraction of the time that it would have taken utilizing previous techniques. This effort was conducted almost exclusively without the need for field reconnaissance due to the ability to evaluate so many features through the GIS-based system. This was of particular benefit since much of the work was completed during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Limiting potential exposures for both HGA and Aethon personnel was a top priority at the time and utilizing RouteNAV helped minimize the potential for unnecessary risks.
HGA has continued to support Aethon on the further phases of the project, providing ROW, survey, engineering, and inspection services to help tie the Sligo and Wiggins Facility pipelines together, said Wynn Rogers, Vice President of Pipeline Services. “HGA is proud to support Aethon in their efforts to bring more clean-burning natural gas to market and are confident that the RouteNAV process will continue to play a vital role in Aethon’s efforts to minimize environmental impacts as well as to reduce the capital costs required to bring new wells online.”