Sask. manufacturing firms make big moves
SASKATOON — Fabricating a stainless steel vessel taller than an office building and heavier than a jetliner is difficult, but moving it is even harder.
This week, a massive double-wall steel tank built by AGI Envirotank in Biggar is heading to Estevan. AGI Envirotank director of operations Jeff Burton says the 19.8-metre, 99,780-kilogram tank is the largest vessel the company has ever built.
“It kind of looks like a 45-gallon drum sitting on a skateboard,” he said with a laugh.
The vessel — which can hold 1.27 million litres — will be used to store amine at SaskPower’s Boundary Dam carbon capture facility.
Fabrication by about 20 workers began in May. On Sunday, the finished tank was loaded onto a specialized 16-axle trailer supplied by the moving firm Entrec.
“We brought in a 300-tonne crane and a 500-tonne crane,” Burton said. “What happens is, (one) crane lifts it up on the trunnions and then the other crane starts lifting up on the tailing lugs and it just kind of rotates until it’s horizontal. Then the trailer actually just backs in underneath and we set it down.”
The procession rolled out of Biggar early Monday morning. Burton expects the journey to take four days.
“It goes quite slow,” he said. “There’s pilot vehicles ahead. SaskPower travels with them. They lift some lines and they cut and reconnect some depending on where they are.”
Though huge, AGI Envirotank’s vessel is dwarfed by four tanks being built by Saskatoon’s JNE Welding.
At 35.5 metres and 275,000 kilograms, each cylinder is as long as an 11-storey building and as heavy as six Boeing 737 airliners.
“Fabrication for the first one, it took us about four months,” said JNE Welding vice president of operations Adam Logue.
The tanks are for Eta Process Plant, a subsidiary of Koch Chemical Technology Group, and will be used by Imperial Oil for process water de-aeration at the Kearl Lake oilsands project north of Fort McMurray.
When it came time to move the first vessel into a temporary building for insulating and painting, JNE contracted the international heavy moving firm Mammoet’s lifting trailer with more than 100 wheels.
Moving the tank across the yard took five hours. The trip to northern Alberta will take about six days.