coatings: containment
The compression station’s crew handled
much of the early work with the old tanks:
they were disconnected, dismantled,
decontaminated, and removed. Before the
new 16,800-gallon tanks were installed,
the crew put down the pre-sprayed
liners directly over the ground on which
the tanks would sit. At that point, the
containment area was ready for CSI to
take over, and so the company sent a crew
of four to the compression station.
Due to the nature of the operation, the
compression station was a staunchly
secure facility; the CSI crew had to go
through three gates just to get to the
containment area. Security wasn’t the
only on-site consideration, however. At
all times during the installation, the crew
had to wear air monitoring equipment,
as one of the byproducts removed from
natural gas during dehydration process
is hydrogen sulfide, or H2S. While the
compound is actually produced in
small amounts by the human body, the
concentration of H2S removed from
natural gas is roughly twenty times the
lethal limit ( 20,000 ppm vs. 1,000 ppm).
With that hazard present, everyone
working at the facility is required to
undergo training for working at job sites
with H2S present, and also to wear air
monitoring devices that are specifically
set to detect H2S. While the precautions
might sound extreme, Kennedy stressed
that it’s really just business-as-usual for
the kinds of industrial applications CSI
typically does. Moreover, the possibility
of exposure was even less at the
compression station’s containment area.
Small pieces of geotextile fabric being fitted together around a pipe protrusion
48 MAY/JUNE 2013
