Natural gas client meets ambitious permitting deadlines for pipeline with our help

Client challenge 

Our natural gas client needed to install a 78-mile pipeline to meet growing energy needs. The company was under pressure to complete the project, from concept through completion, within a 30-month timeline. Meeting customer needs and contractual obligations was of the utmost importance to the company.

Given seasonal weather cycles, it was imperative to ensure the permitting and associated field surveys ran smoothly and were completed on-time. The permitting process also required coordination with numerous agencies, subcontractors, and team members — further complicating the effort. To ensure our client could install the pipeline, they also needed to finalize more than 600 private property owner easements.

The client knew Haley & Aldrich experts are adept at the FERC permitting processes and understand the complexities involved in project management and community relations — so it asked us to partner with them to ensure it met the deadline.

Our approach

The Haley & Aldrich team knew that in order to meet the aggressive deadline, we would need to rely both on our depth of experience and ability to think critically and creatively to find the most efficient approaches for our client.

A critical first area of focus for the project was to aggregate and organize an enormous amount of data associated with the project needed for getting the FERC approval and project permits. This would allow us to accurately depict key project features and efficiently support field activities and project analysis. To accomplish this, we utilized Geographic Information System (GIS) data management and analysis to depict real-time environmental, resource, land use, survey, and property ownership data along the 78-mile corridor. This supported the field activity tracking, project impact analysis, and allowed the project team to visualize the disparate pieces of data so we could keep the project on schedule.

Our client relied on us to ensure field work — which involved multiple crews totaling nearly 50 individuals — was efficiently managed. We did so by creating simple-but-effective tracking tools that project team members could access through an exclusive web portal. Our team, client, and various subcontractors all had access to the portal, including file sharing. It was a crucial element to successfully managing fieldwork and ensured all team members were on the same page and tracking project milestones. Our team distilled the tracking data to a one-page spreadsheet and status map of land parcels, allowing for easy visual communication of the most significant risks.

One of the most crucial parts of the project was community outreach. We partnered with our client’s team to engage in public and individual meetings with citizens. We took an approach that focused on transparency, conveying fact-based information, and finding middle ground with landowners to accommodate their requests, balance or reduce potential impacts, and quell fears. This focused outreach effort ensured our client’s project was completed on schedule.

Our team’s hands-on, efficiency-focused approach to all aspects of the project — from obtaining permits to keeping track of each step and milestone — ensured the client was able to install the pipeline and honor its customer commitments.

Value delivered

• Met all deadlines to complete field surveys and permitting so the client could install the pipeline and meet its client contract commitments