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The Solimoes Basin is the second largest gas reserve in Brazil and the challenge was how to get it to the urban areas in the Amazon. One doesn’t think of the Amazon being very populated apart from Manaus, built and made famous since the days of the rubber boom in the early 20thcentury.
The pipeline is 661 km long, costing £1.8 billion and main trunk line runs from Urucu to Coari and on to Manaus, with seven branch lines to the smaller cities on the way. As you might expect there were many challenges on the way as there is a lack of infra-structure in the forest and therefore the construction teams had to be very independent, working with the Brazilian Army, who set up 22 work camps at regular intervals, each with a capacity for 160 people.
The natural gas will be used to power a number of thermo-electrical plants in the area to provide electricity to 1.5 million people, as part of the government’s new policy of “Lights for All”. In the past most of the electricity has been powered by diesel, which will automatically reduce emissions for the area.
As a lot of the area is under water and of course there are the trees, there were some difficulties finding space to put the pipelines together and so huge 1 km rafts were constructed upon which the sections were assembled before being coupled together. Overall some 6,000 floats were used in the project, which also allowed the work to continue during the seventh month long rainy season from November to June.
Two aspects of the project during the journey across the forest, eight sites of special archaeological interest were discovered with finds of artefacts dated back some 3,000 years and these items will be brought together to create a special museum. The other concern was the health aspect and the hazards faced by the workforce with the constant marauding mosquitoes, which had the potential of carrying malaria and dengue fever, and also other known diseases like yellow fever and Chagas disease. Overall lots of challenges and demonstrates the many sorts of huge infrastructure projects being undertaken as part of the PAC 1(Plano de Acceleracao do Crescimento) started in 2007 by President Lula.
©William Barron - Business in Brazil - August 26th2011
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