A city of steel is on the rise across the street from the Agrium Fertilizer plant in Sturgeon County.
Seven years ago, this 600-acre site east of Gibbons was but a farmer's field.
Now, it's a playground for industrial machinery. Backhoes frolic in the dirt. Pile drivers clang away as they bash steel pilings into the ground. Huge yellow dump trucks rumble past great rents in the earth, while cranes swing hunks of wood and iron ponderously through the air.
In amongst all this activity are some 900 people working hard to build the biggest industrial project the county has seen in decades: the Sturgeon Refinery.
And in amongst them is Doug Bertsch, vice-president of regulatory and stakeholder affairs for the North West Redwater Partnership, there to give the Gazette an exclusive tour of the site.
Big logistics
This summer was the start of the aboveground phase of this $8.5 billion project, Bertsch says. Hundreds of giant modules will eventually be assembled on site to form the complex machinery that will transform viscous bitumen into smooth diesel.
The amount of materiel and manpower required is immense.
Crews expect to go through 9,000 tonnes of steel and 2,400 cubic metres of concrete before the project is done, Bertsch says – that's equivalent to about 157 Leopard tanks of metal and a little under an Olympic pool's worth of concrete. They'll also need about 130 kilometres of surface piping to hook all the various bits of the refinery together. Laid end to end, that pipe would stretch from St. Albert to Ponoka.
The site will host some 1,000 workers a day by the end of October and up to 5,000 a day by next summer, Bertsch says.
North West has a team of logistics specialists to co-ordinate the convoys of trucks moving on and off the site, Bertsch says. They've reserved a full quarter section of land to act as a holding pen for parts and modules, and have a small village of portables to serve as offices for specialists and engineers.
To prevent traffic jams, the company started busing its crews to the site as of mid-September. It also has a second fleet of white school buses to move workers around on site.
Big buildings
Phase One of the refinery will take up about 40 per cent of the North West site, Bertsch says, as he drives into the construction zone.
He stops by some particularly large pits that are a part of the site's waterworks.
"These are the pools for surface water collection," he explains.
"All the ditches will drain to this area."
The refinery is licensed to take up to 1,857,120 cubic metres of water a year from the North Saskatchewan River, reports Alberta Environment – equivalent to about a third of what St. Albert's population uses in a typical year, the Gazette estimates.
These five large pools – the largest of which covers about 10 acres – are meant to reduce that water use, Bertsch says. Pipes and ditches channel rainwater and polluted process water into these ponds for on-site treatment and reuse.
"The water use would be significantly more if we didn't recycle," he says.
Bertsch heads past what appear to be several large UFO landing pads surrounded by concrete rings. These big flat circular areas – each big enough to enclose a few homes – will be the bases for the holding tanks the refinery will use to contain bitumen and diesel, he explains.
Some of this city's biggest structures are being created in one of the refinery site's biggest buildings: the reactor assembly building. Roughly three storeys tall and the size of seven basketball courts, this structure is where those 12 huge steel components that rolled through Sturgeon County last winter ended up.
To assemble these components into the refinery's sausage-shaped reactors, crews first lift them onto specialized platforms equipped with high capacity rollers, Bertsch says.
Crews then pre-heat the components using massive amounts of electricity – if they don't, the heat of the welding will cause temperature stresses to build up in the metal. The giant rollers slowly rotate the reactor parts so that a stationary machine (the design of which is a trade secret) can weld them together with yet more electricity.
"It's a continuous arc of light," Bertsch says of the welding, and sounds like a jet engine.
Each reactor piece is about 10 inches thick and can weigh up to a million pounds, so it takes about 72 hours of continuous welding to hook any two together, Bertsch says.
"During that time, you cannot stop the process," he adds – if you do, you have to re-heat the parts again.
Once the weld is finished, it's inspected using a wide variety of x-ray and other scanners before being heated with electricity to relieve any stress on the metal. Crews then roll the finished pieces out and move two more into position.
The finished reactors will be up to 100 metres long, 1,000 tonnes in weight and be mounted vertically, Bertsch says.
To install them, crews will hook a crane to both ends, hoist them into position over a ring of bolts and lower them into place.
Bigger things to come
Crews and engineers have already logged about four million hours on this project so far, Bertsch says.
But their biggest challenges will arrive early next year in the form of the 900-some modules that make up the refinery itself.
"There are going to be hundreds of modules," Bertsch says, some of which are seven metres tall, seven wide and 30 long. Crews will have to hook them to each other and the site's belowground pipe network before the refinery can start up.
Bertsch says the refinery will start operations by late 2016 at the earliest. Once it is, it will process about 50,000 barrels of bitumen a day and net the county about $5 to $10 million a year in property taxes. It will also have a population of about 300 full-time staffers.
And this metal metropolis could grow even more after that – North West has another 600 acres of land it could expand onto in the future, Bertsch says.
Questions on the refinery should go to Bertsch at 403-451-4171.
