Published: March 04, 2008 02:49 pm      

Pipeline

DUNCAN — Roads and pipes allow cars and substances to travel long distances.

In Monday morning’s meeting of Stephens County commissioners, road and pipe projects were the topics of discussion.

Commissioner Dee Bowen announced the overlay is finished on old U.S. Highway 81 from Refinery Road to the Duncan city limits as of Thursday.

“I applied for the federal grant five years ago,” Bowen said. “It took a long time, but it was worth it.”

The grant that was applied for was worth about $500,000 and resulted in three miles of road being covered with 2 inches of overlay pavement.

But the project is not entirely completed.

“We need to stripe the road,” he said. “Hopefully, it will be completed in a couple of weeks.”

After reviewing the progress, Bowen said that a man had come and talked with the commissioners on Friday and let them know about a future pipe-laying project that will start in Velma.

Tom Droege, spokesman for One OK Partners, said that his company will lay a 12- to 16-inch-diameter pipe that will run about 440 miles straight south and end at a processing plant at Mont Belvieu, Texas.

The purpose of the pipe is to transport raw natural gas liquids (NGL) from Velma to a plant in Mont Belvieu where ethane, propane and butane will be separated, Droege said.

After the elements are separated, they will then be distributed to various chemical and plastic industries around the country.

One OK Partners decided to build the pipeline to conserve costs and make the transportation of NGLs much safer and efficient.

“We have been transporting NGLs by truck from Velma,” he said. “The demand has gone up recently and this will help us meet the greater demand.”

He also said that the roads will not be beaten up as much because heavy trucks won’t have to be used anymore.

The time it will take for a gallon of NGL to travel from Velma to Mont Belvieu will be a few days, but it will be more efficient than transportation by trucks because it will be a continuous volume moving 24 hours a day, Droege said.

Laying pipeline is not necessarily a new thing for One OK.

“We have a network of pipes from all across Oklahoma that transports NGLs to our plant in Mont Belvieu,” Droege said. “Velma’s pipe will be a completely new and separate line.”

Droege said that there will be a huge economic benefit to the local areas.

“In Stephens and Jefferson counties, we are laying 34 miles of pipe, which we estimate to bring about $400,000 of property tax each year,” he said.

The entire construction part of the project should take about six months and should impact the local economies in a drastic way.

“We estimate that the entire economic impact for every local area to be about $2,000,000 over the course of the construction,” Droege said.

The process for laying miles of pipes has been a long road.

Droege said that the company had to survey the land and select the best route to preserve the environment. The surveys were collected by geologists and they collected data on wildlife, the soil, etc.

The company also had to apply and receive permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers along with state and local governments.

The pipe will routinely be maintained by a robot that will travel inside the pipe, cleaning up any corrosion and making sure there are no leaks.

“It’s called a pig,” Droege said in reference to the robot. “With the technologies we have today, our pipes could last upwards of a couple hundred years.”

The pipeline is expected to transport 160,000 barrels of raw NGL per day to the Mont Belvieu plant.

It will cost One OK Partners about $260,000,000 to complete the entire project.