Vermeer Texas

Just as storefront businesses rely on three key factors for success — “location, location, location” — much of the success in today’s fast-paced construction industry depends on a similar proposition: production, production, production. When customers commit to projects, they want contractors to get the work done “yesterday,” and that’s when having the right equipment pays dividends.

For a Texas underground company that focuses on building infrastructure for natural gas and hydrocarbon liquids, the acquisition of a Vermeer^® bucket wheel trencher attachment powered by a Vermeer T655 Commander 3 tractor significantly increased its pipeline production.

“We had been looking for a bucket wheel for some time when we were awarded a gathering blanket contract that consisted of laying 60 miles (96.6 km) of 6-inch (15.2 cm) and 8-inch (20.3 cm) gathering lines of various lengths,” said John Blevins, vice president and general manager of Bottom Line Services, which is headquartered in George West, Texas, about 60 miles (96.6 km) northwest of Corpus Christi. “The project area, spread over a 50-mile (80.5 km) radius in and around LaSalle County, had the right types of soils and small rocks to make the bucket wheel a fit for the application.”

Bottom Line Services got its start in 2000 when Greg Blevins returned to south Texas after working for 23 years in the oil and gas industry. Soon after, Terry and Lisa Jackson joined the company, bringing more than 40 years of pipeline construction management experience with them.

“We rented the bucket wheel for the first two months to see how it would perform in those soil conditions,” Blevins explained. “Based on our evaluation, we decided to purchase the machine, and we’ve been working it ever since. It works excellent and has helped us increase our production an average of about 40 percent.”

In fact, Vermeer designed the bucket wheel specifically for the installation of smaller-diameter cross-country pipelines. It can cut trench widths of 22, 24 or 28 inches (55.9, 60.9 or 71.1 cm) and depths to 80 inches (203.2 cm). 

With 400 employees in its pipeline and field facility divisions, Bottom Line Services works mainly in south Texas but has completed projects all over the state and into Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and Oklahoma. They started the gathering blanket project for Hopfield Services a year ago and completed their work in November.

Called “gathering lines” because they gather up liquids from multiple wells and funnel the liquid into transport lines, the lines are regular carbon steel pipe and typically have 3 to 4 feet (.9 to 1.2 m) of cover.

“We might lay anywhere from a mile to 7 or more miles (1.6 to 11.2 km) of pipe in various locations, and so for bidding we worked with the customer to base everything off footage and a set price for the moves based on mileage,” said Blevins. “That is fair for the customer and for us.”

On these types of projects, Bottom Line Services will lay the pipe on the ground and do 90 percent of the welding above ground. Then the crew will cut the ditch, place the pipe and backfill. 

“It’s a sequence but here in south Texas we can get a lot of rain, so we don’t want to have too much open ditch,” says Blevins. “The laying crew gets started by welding the pipe sections together, and then we’ll start trenching, laying pipe in the trench and then backfilling. The main benefit of using a bucket wheel in these conditions is speed, but the ground conditions have to be good. We had tremendous amounts of rain during the project, and when the ground was so saturated we determined it was better to wait a day or two, to let it dry up.”

Along with the bucket wheel, other equipment the pipeline crew used on the gathering lines included dozers, excavators, backhoes and maintainers. And, with six welders on-site to fabricate and lay the pipe, the crew generally installed about a mile of trench in a day.

In addition to using the bucket wheel on smaller pipe installations for gathering lines, Bottom Line Services employs the machine for topsoiling on projects that require larger-diameter pipe.

“A lot of landowners request that we topsoil the first 8 to 18 inches (20.3 to 45.7 cm) and save that soil to the side for reuse,” Blevins noted. “We use the bucket wheel because of the speed and ability to save the topsoil to one side, and then after we cut the deeper ditch, we drop and cover our lines using the topsoil. When we have ideal soil conditions, we can achieve 50 to 60 feet per minute (15.2 to 18.3 m/min) of production. In other areas, even with challenging soil conditions, we can get 20 to 30 feet per minute (6.1 to 9.1 m/min).”

On gathering lines and for topsoiling operations, the benefit of using the bucket wheel, Blevins said, is speed. And the bottom line for Bottom Line Services is that speed equals production, production, production.