Laying Pipeline

Interesting video, thanks for posting. As to why not do more welding on shore, I'd guess it has to do with the hazards of handling big, heavy objects at sea. The video shows very placid water conditions. In rough weather, longer sections of pipe would be very much harder to move between the supply barge the the ship using a crane.

bob prohaska

Thanks for the post. That was way cool. Here is the link to part two of the vid:

As to your question: Those pipe sections look about one flatbed rail road car in length. Start at pipe manufacturing plant....load to flatbed rail car.....rail trip to port....port loads pipe sections to transport barge......transport barge to assembly ship. The rail car is the limiting factor in pipe length.

They weld two short lengths together in one pass using the submerged arc method. As far as work flow, this one pass welding is quicker (and probably cheaper) then the multi-pass welds done further down the line. This assures a ready supply of pipe into the final product line even accounting for whatever down time may happen to occur in the initial preparation area (bringing pipe up from the hold and welding the two sections together).

It looks like the engineers that designed this whole process pretty well knew what they were doing. I am impressed with the ingenuity of them damn humans sometimes. Dave

I was impressed because for once, there is a video that explains what is happening, and shows the processes involved, the work flow and the support to make it possible.

Thanks for the explanation about the two types of welding processes. The first stage, they can rotate the pipes as they weld them. The submerged arc never has to be inverted. The main line welding, that does not appear to be an option.