14 November 2024

Longest and deepest drilling of Porthos route successfully completed

On Friday evening, 8 November, the drilling under the Beerkanaal in Rotterdam’s Europoort was successfully completed. The Beerkanaal crossing, one of 40 special crossings within the Porthos route, marks the longest and deepest drilling of the project. The horizontal directional drilling has a length of 1,445 metres and a depth of 50 metres. It connects both sides of the Beerkanaal and is an important milestone for the completion of the Porthos project.

To complete the bore, two drilling rigs were used to drill towards each other from the two banks – a so-called meet-in-the-middle or intersection drilling. After the successful meeting of the drill rods at a depth of about 50 metres below NAP, reaming was started, making the borehole larger. The borehole was reamed in several stages to a diameter of 1,400 millimetres, sufficiently large to allow the pipe to pass through. The entire pipe of almost 1.5 kilometres was then brought to the correct entry angle with the help of telecranes; an impressive operation considering the enormous weight of the pipe, which weighs about 750 kilos per metre. The retraction operation went very smoothly and could be completed in about 15 hours.

The Porthos project
Porthos is the first CO2 transport and storage project of this size in the European Union. The CO2 infrastructure includes a land pipeline of about 30 kilometres to which Porthos customers connect their CO2 capture installations, a compressor station with several buildings, a sea pipeline and an existing platform in the North Sea located about 20 kilometres off the coast. From this former gas extraction platform, CO2 is pumped to the depleted gas field. The depleted gas field is a sealed space of porous sandstone at a depth of more than 3 kilometres in the North Sea bed.

Progress of construction work
Construction of the Porthos CCS project in the port of Rotterdam is progressing on schedule. Hard work is being done at more than ten locations along the route to ensure timely completion of the infrastructure. Construction of the land pipeline is expected to be completed in the second half of 2025. Laying of the marine pipeline and work on the offshore platform will start in 2025, with the aim of making the Porthos system operational in 2026.

Also watch the video in which Porthos Construction Manager Leon de Graaf tells – in Dutch – how the drilling went step by step, from the preparations to the withdrawal of the pipeline string.