( corrosion control )

Vlad
Popovici,
Bredero Shaw,
Canada, talks about
an innovative technology
for applying a cementitious
coating to a rotating pipe,
which began a revolution in
the pipe coating industry
some forty years ago.

ipelines in submarine and

wet environments need
negative buoyancy to keep
them at the bottom of the sea,
lake or river, as well as mechanical
protection against impacts from
fishing trawlers, anchors, etc. Forty
years ago, the idea of protecting
and weighing pipe with a concrete
coating was not new, but as fusion
bonded epoxy (FBE) was rapidly
gaining in use and popularity as
the anti-corrosion protection of
choice in the western hemisphere,
the industry needed a technology
that would apply concrete on the
pipe quickly and uniformly without
damaging any of the anti-corrosion
coatings, including nominal
12-14mm FBE.
After several years of research,
David Gardner and J.B. Mallard
invented the compression coat
technology in 1968 in Texas. The
pipe was rotated and conveyed by
support wheels at controlled rates
up to and through the concrete
applicator. Concrete was applied at
the required thickness in one pass.
The continuous concrete mixing
increased the coating speed, while
the steel wire mesh embedded in
the concrete reinforced it against
impact. The tensioned polyethylene
outerwrap provided an impervious
moisture barrier, allowing complete
hydration of the cement. Belt
mounts supported, rotated, and
transported the concrete coated

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( corrosion control )
Figure 3. Stack of compression
coated pipes protected at one of
Bredero Shaws mobile facilities.

legacy
A concrete

Figure 1. Stack of compression coated pipes protected at one of Bredero Shaws mobile

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( corrosion control )

Figure 2. Compression coat application process.

pipe away from the applicator. After the concrete was
cutback, the ends cleaned, and the coated pipe weighed
and measured in compliance with the specifications, the
coated pipe was then moved to the storage area.
The compression coat technology offers high
productivity with minimal process material waste, a smooth
outside diameter, a consistent coating that will meet or
exceed tight weight, and thickness tolerances that will not
damage the anti-corrosion coating.

The early years

The new coating technology developed by David Gardner

and J.B. Mallard immediately drew the attention of
Southwest Growth Pool, a diversified conglomerate in the
US. The Southwest Growth Pool asked David Gardner
to build a concrete weight coating plant for a customer
in Africa. The plant was built and shipped to Nigeria, but
the inventors did not retain any ownership rights and had
to sign a five-year non-competition agreement with the
Southwest Growth Pool.
After the expiration of the non-competition agreement,
David Gardner incorporated Compression Coat Inc.
(CCI) in February 1973 and built a new plant during the
next nine months. The plant was installed in time for
the first coating project of the new company in a yard

owned by Gaido-Lingle Company, a well-known pipeline

services company in Texas. The plant was then moved in
1976 to Orange, Texas, to start working on the Colonial
Pipeline project. At the same time, the construction of a
second coating plant was completed and it was sent to
start the second spread of the Colonial Pipeline project
at Opelousas, Louisiana. In 1978, CCI sold its first
compression coat plant abroad - the plant was deployed
in Punta Arenas, Chile, which has the record for the
southernmost concrete coating plant location.
The technology was finally protected in the late 1970s
by multiple patents that recognised the research and
development efforts of the CCI team. This was especially
significant, as the company was not only coating pipelines,
but also selling its plants to other companies and indirectly,
the know-how for using them. The companys growth
strategy thus had two main elements during these early
years to focus on coating projects using fully-owned
plants in the US, while selling plants abroad. For the
domestic projects in the US, a plant would be mobilised
from the CCI hub in Conroe, Texas to a location close to
the pipeline right-of-way and set up there by the CCI team.
A small CCI team supported by local employees would
complete the coating project, dismantle (or demobilise) the
plant and ship it back to Conroe to be prepared for the next
project. By the mid-1980s, compression coat technology
had been mobilised at over 40 sites throughout the US and
had coated more than 2000 km of pipelines.
Internationally, by 1986, two plants were active in
the US, and one in the UK, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and
Brazil. Compression coat was ready to enter a new stage
in its development.

Becoming a global technology

The industry was quick to recognise that the compression

coat process, known since under different names such
as rotary concrete extrusion process, side-wrap process,

Figure 3. Compression coat mobile facility.

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( corrosion control )

wrap process, and compression wrap process, produced

concrete coatings that were superior to those applied
by other methods. As a result, many coating companies
around the world took advantage of the fact that they
could buy the technology and, today, many still use
concrete coating processes that are similar to the original
compression coat. This made it increasingly difficult for
CCI (the company) to compete for international and even
US projects, especially once the patents protecting the
technology reached the end of their life.
A concrete coating project completed by CCI in 1994 in
Trapani (Italy) marked a new leap forward in the technology
and gave CCI a strong competitive advantage: mobilising
the plants for coating projects virtually anywhere in the
world in a very short period of time. Compression coat
plants, split in modules that were easy to transport and
handle, were shipped by truck, ship or even plane in the
case of a project in China in 1996 overseas to Africa,
Europe or Asia. Mobilisation allowed CCI to reduce the
overall logistic costs of the coating projects by hiring local
employees and using local raw materials cement, heavy
aggregates, sand - and rolling stock - cranes, trucks, front
end loaders, etc.
In order to create a differentiated offer for the
customers, the CCI team tried to improve the quality of the
compression coat product by using steel fibre or fibreglass
reinforcement instead of steel wire mesh or introducing
hollow glass spheres in the concrete mix to obtain a lighter
coating. CCI also stayed ahead of the competition by
targeting new markets, such as water pipelines, or trying
to create new products, such as mechanical protection
coatings for the onshore markets that would be bendable
according to the industry specifications. The proactive
approach of the CCI team has turned compression coat
into the most robust and flexible protective and weight
coating in the industry.

Innovation in the new millennium

Recognising the value of the compression coat

technology, a predecessor company of Bredero Shaw

Figure 4. Rock Jacket can now be coated in a Bredero Shaw

mobile plant.
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bought out Compression Coat Inc. (CCI) in August 1998,

thus integrating both the technology and the team that
developed it in the leading pipe coating company in the
world. This integration also opened new international
markets for compression coat and added research and
development resources for improving the technology. CCI
continued to exist in the new structure and its dedicated
team continued the tradition of innovation that always
surrounded the compression coat technology.
CCI continued to successfully complete increasingly
challenging concrete coating projects around the world.
The flexibility of the technology allowed it to coat a large
pipe diameter range, from 150 mm (6 in.) to 1320 mm
(52 in.) with concrete thicknesses from 25 mm to 150 mm
and different concrete densities. A look at the compression
coat project portfolio of recent years shows projects in
the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, with lengths going
from several hundred meters to longrange projects such as
Gulfstream (USA, 2001, 687 km), Lobina & Carpa (Mexico,
2005, 280 km), West Africa Gas Pipeline (Ghana, 2005,
598 km) or the Balearic Pipeline (Spain, 2008, 267 km).
The original technology is today managed and
developed by Compression Coat Technology (CCT), a
new Bredero Shaw business unit created in May 2007 and
based in Conroe, Texas.
The research and development efforts focus on
improving the equipment, the process, and the related
logistics to create the most mobile concrete coating plants
in the world. New materials that improve the performance
of the coating are also being used. Finally, there is a
diversification of the product portfolio of the compression
coat plants. The latest product addition is Rock Jacket,
a bendable mechanical protection system for onshore
pipelines developed by Bredero Shaw that can now be
applied in mobilised plants anywhere in the world.

The future

The compression coat process remains today the

industrys leading coating system for concrete weight
coating projects requiring rapid mobilisation or coating
near the right-of-way. Ideal for both small and large
diameters, it can apply a concrete coating over the
most common anti-corrosion and insulation coatings.
Compression coat has successfully completed over 250
large and hundreds of small projects for more than 150
customers in over 60 locations around the world and looks
forward to making the list longer.
Bredero Shaw would not be celebrating the 40th
anniversary of compression coat without the dedicated
people who created the process, improved the plant
equipment and the concrete coatings, and managed
increasingly complex concrete coating projects around the
world. Some of these dedicated people who witnessed the
exciting first years of the technology are still working today
to improve it and to transfer their valuable knowledge to
those who will take the compression coat heritage into the
future.

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