Tanami Gas Pipeline data integrity and materials traceability

Sentanil System’s Construction Management System (CMS) was a key tool used in the management of the pipeline Quality Assurance and Quality Control requirements of the recently completed 440 km Tanami Gas Pipeline in Northern Territory.

Newmont Mining Corporation engaged Australian Gas Infrastructure Group (AGIG) to build a gas pipeline to supply gas to its Granites and DBS mines, approximately 550km north-west of Alice Springs. This 440km pipeline follows the alignment of the Tanami Road, passing through a mix of pastoral land, Aboriginal freehold land and Crown land to connect the existing Amadeus Gas Pipeline to Newmont’s Tanami gold mines. It provides Newmont with the ability to use cost effective, reliable and cleaner gas fired power generation in place of existing diesel power generation.

AGIG contracted MPC Kinetic to construct the pipeline, which commenced early in June 2018, and was essentially completed by the end of December 2018. MPC Kinetic engaged Sentanil Systems for the use of the CMS system and associated support for the pipeline construction.

It was a challenging project due to the remoteness, associated limited communications infrastructure and the fast pace of construction. Two mainline crews working simultaneously usually a few hundred kilometres apart and the stringent MDR validation requirements following each hydro test section. Hence it was important to collect the right and relevant data in the field by the inspectors on the intelligent handheld data or scan units, using our data capture program. The program has recently been enhanced to enable intelligent lookups based on other linked lookups (eg. electrode batches and welding procedures) and also provides the ability of GPS data capture at the same time, if required.

Key QA/QC activities and statistics

CMS was also used extensively to produce many of the MDR report requirements, which were subject to extensive third party validation immediately following completion of the 8 hydro test sections. CMS was used to produce the weekly progress ‘Rainbow’ charts.

The CMS project data has been integrated with the survey and other locational related data, and uploaded into AGIG’s corporate X-Info Suite, GIS, Land Management, DBYD and AS2885 systems to provide ongoing support for the operations and maintenance phase of the pipeline.

Sentanil would like to thank AGIG and MPC Kinetic for their valued support during all phases of this very successful project.

Sentanil is one of Mipela’s sister companies.