PROJECT
PROFILES

Enterprise Products Meeker I Gas Plant Project

This project won a 2007 ABC National Eagle Award for Excellence In Construction and an ABC Bayou Chapter Award of Excellence.

Working under a $24 million contract with S&B Engineers & Constructors for Enterprise Products, L.P., ISC mobilized a hand-picked team of highly trained associates on September 23, 2005, to install electrical and instrumentation systems for a huge greenfield project 6,600 feet above sea level in Western Colorado – the largest natural gas plant in the continental United States.

Enterprise’s Meeker I Project was designed to serve the Piceance Basin and other Rocky Mountain-area deposits comprising the nation’s fastest-growing natural gas field.  The new plant will substantially increase natural gas liquid (NGL) export capacity and provide gas to downstream markets through four major pipelines operated by Entrega, Wyoming Interstate, Trans Colorado and Questar.  Phase one will treat and cryogenically process up to 750 million cubic feet of natural gas to extract up to 35,000 barrels per day of NGL.  When complete, plant capacity will grow to 1.3 million cubic feet of natural gas per day.

To call the job site isolated would be an understatement.  The nearest major highway is 50 miles from the Enterprise Products facility, and there is no significant industrial development within 120 miles.

The schedule was brutal, requiring 175 man-years of highly skilled labor in just 20 months.  Much of the terrain in this high-altitude environment was unstable, and temperatures presented their own hazards – exceeding 100 degrees at times during the site’s extremely short summer and plummeting to 30 degrees below zero in winter.

The labor pool was limited, housing in the area was virtually nonexistent, and there were no nearby cities or supporting infrastructure.  Yet, in spite of these obstacles, ISC associates completed this monumental undertaking with zero lost-time accidents and zero OSHA-recordable safety incidents.

Realizing that organization and recruitment were critical, ISC literally “wrote the book” on natural gas process construction in the Colorado Mountains.  ISC’s project team was tightly integrated with S&B Engineers and Constructors to facilitate constructability reviews and procedure development.  As with any ISC project, ABC affiliation was the basis of vendor and electrical supplier selection.  To make matters more difficult, vendors and suppliers accustomed to supporting small-scale commercial electrical projects were encouraged to adapt.  An intense industrial-electrical training program was created for licensed Colorado electricians, and ISC reached out across the nation to attract additional skilled, experienced craftspeople.

ISC’s responsibilities included temporary power, construction, as well as, permanent underground electrical distribution, perimeter security, card-reading stations, a scale house, power station, lighting and all above-ground electrical and instrumentation for all twelve functional areas, warehouse, generator building, MCC building, substation, flares, infrastructure / combined area, control room, process main pipe rack, amine building, amine tank, amine interconnecting piping, amine electrical / instrumentation, slug-catcher, sleeper (inlet) pipe rack, hot-oil area, NGL / stabilizer, dehydration / regeneration, inlet gas, residue compressor, storage, loading, demethanizer, expander and demethanizer / cryo.

During the job’s 350,000 man-hours, ISC self-performed 100% of the manhours and pulled more than a million feet of cable and wire, installed over 30,000 feet of cable tray and a quarter-million feet of conduit, along with 1,000 lights; 1,000 electrical panels; 50 transformers; 3,000 instruments; 2,500 loops and more than 5,000 I/O points.

A remarkable accomplishment by exceptional people, the largest natural gas processing facility south of the Canadian border is now working around the clock to meet our nation’s growing needs for NGL and natural gas.