10km Steamfield Build

The Nga Awa Purua (NAP) Steamfield has been one of the largest engineering projects undertaken by MB Century. The design and build of the 130MW station Steamfield has kept staff from Design, Fabrication and Mechanical Services busy all year and not to forget the large project team and subcontractors on site with support from our Admin and Safety teams.

The 10km of pipe, thousands of welds and hundreds of supports and foundations took only nine months to design and construct to be ready for Mighty River Power’s commissioning. A very tight programme achieved with, well at least, a day or two to spare. One section of the reinjection lines had to pass up 150m of steep unstable ground. Being both steep and unstable was a challenge. John from Design put in many hours to design deep and super strong plies to pin the pipeline to stable ground under the unstable layer. The entire pipeline for the steepest section was spooled in one section and positioned with 4 excavators located along the route.

In building the pipeline in excess of 100,000 man hours was achieved, 50 MB Century employees were involved, 32 qualified welders, 2,400 welds were produced using over 1 tonne of welding consumables. After extensive x-ray and the latest ultrasonic testing were carried out on the welds, it was found that only 3 had to be repaired!

We look forward to the next project like this so we can prove once again that MB Century New Zealand are at the top of their field, completing these large projects to a high standard of quality and safety performance.

We wish Mighty River Power well in the completion of their project.

And thanks to our staff and contractors for their efforts.

Four excavators were used to position pipeline spooled  in one section on the steepest section of the route.	Same pipeline two months  after construction.