23/07/2026
The project started with the support. Before any spool went near a weld line, the crew fabricated the structures that would carry it once it was in the ground and under pressure. Cutting, forming, welding the base pieces to spec, checking the fit before anything got tacked in place, right there on site. No shortcuts here. A support that's off by a few millimetres doesn't just look wrong, it fights the pipe every day it's in service.
Once the supports were ready, the real work moved to the spool. This was the centerpiece of the whole job. Pipe sections, fittings, and flanges were cut, bevelled, and fitted together on site, section by section, with fit-up checks confirmed before the welder struck an arc. The crew worked joint by joint, checking alignment at each stage, because a spool doesn't get judged on how clean it looks assembled. It gets judged on whether it holds when the line comes alive.
After the welding was done, the spool moved into surface preparation and painting. The steel had to be blasted clean before any coat went on, since paint holds to nothing if the surface underneath is still carrying rust, mill scale, or weld residue. Once that surface was right, the coating went on in layers, standing between bare steel and everything Bayelsa's environment throws at a buried or exposed line over the years. Skip the blast and prep, and the coating fails quietly, long before anyone on site would notice.
Then came MPI. This was the stage where nothing got to hide. The welds that looked fine to the eye went under magnetic particle inspection to check for surface and near-surface cracks, the kind that don't show up until a line is already carrying pressure. Nothing moved past this point on how good it looked. It moved past on what the inspection actually confirmed.
By the time the spool was ready for tie-in, it had already survived everything that could have gone wrong with it. That's the whole point of building it this way. What the line sees is a finished piece. What it doesn't see is every stage that made sure it would still be sound years from now.
