L&T Hydrocarbon Engineering and McDermott, a global oil and gas contractor, have come together to establish a first-of-its-kind facility in India capable of fabricating kilometre-long pipelines in oil and gas fields.

The trick here is that steel pipes of several kilometres are spooled, like hose, onto giant reels on board specialised vessels, which will lay them on the seabed.

The spool base set up in Kattupalli, North of Chennai, at L&T Hydrocarbon’s modular manufacturing unit, will weld together 12-metre steel pipes to create one-kilometre-long pipelines.

That’s not all. Special vessels from McDermott will spool these kilometre-long pipes, which will be welded continuously as they are taken onboard to form a continuous 12-kilometre pipeline.

The facility, formally inaugurated on Friday, will cater to a ₹2,600-crore ($370 million) ONGC contract that L&T Hydrocarbon-McDermott bagged for sub-sea installation of pipelines for Vashishta and S1 gasfields in the KG Basin off Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh.

Subramanian Sarma, CEO & MD, L&T Hydrocarbon, said the spool base technology, brought to India by McDermott, will give them access to major projects in the oil and gas sectors. It adds to the capability of the company’s onshore and offshore fabrication facility that targets contracts on the east coast as well as the Asia-Pacific markets.

Soon GE Oil & Gas, a high-end equipment supplier for the spool base project, will join L&T and McDermott as a partner to bid for similar projects, he said.

TK Sengupta, Director (Offshore), ONGC, said the access to technology is the “start of a beginning” in tapping opportunities in the gas sector which will underpin economic growth in the coming decade. The east coast alone will see investments of $10-15 billion over the next five years by ONGC. “Next year this time, gas will begin to flow from the KG Basin fields,” he said.