Product Profile: South Texas Gateway Terminal

Tarsco in Spring, Texas was awarded the 2020 STI/SPFA API 650 Atmospheric Oil Storage Tank of the Year for the South Texas Gateway Terminal.

We had an opportunity to speak about the project further with Brian Iskra, Operations Manager – USA at Tarsco, a TF Warren Group Corporation.

The scope of work for the South Texas Gateway Terminal in Ingleside, Texas, was 20 tanks that were 209-feet in diameter by 70 feet tall. They were approximately 430,000 barrels each. They were crude tanks.

Our scope of work was:

• Engineering
• Procurement
• Fabrication and construction of the:
  • Stone columns
  • Deep foundations
  • Ring wall
  • Load transfer pad
  • Tank erection with steel, internal floating roof
  • Aluminum geodesic dome roofs
  • Internal liner
  • External coating

In July 2019, the erection of the steel tank started. Two bottoms were laid and one of the tanks had the first shell course being erected. The rigs were installed in the stone columns.

In December of 2019, about six months later, we progressed to the point where we’re now constructing about ten tanks. We started on the bottoms in the first two shell courses of two tanks. We were running four shells up, including the wing girders and we’ve already erected the dome roofs. Underneath the geodesic dome roofs, the steel internal floating roof was being installed.

May 2020, we progressed kind of in an assembly line. We have external coatings being applied in on the first two tanks and the aluminum geodesic dome on the bottom of the tank on the floor has been erected. We installed a hoist to hoist this roof up.

In July 2020, quite a bit more progress was made. We started on two of the last four tanks. Foundations were being constructed on the other two tanks.

What was an amazing feat is the amount of work that we were able to perform in 12 month. The amount of barrels that were built on this one site in one year is astonishing.  These are huge tanks; it’s hard to put it into scale. The sheer amount of work that went into this, and not just on the tank side, but the entire project in one year is amazing. It’s something we’re very proud of.

The peak manpower for Tasco for the erection of the tanks and also the erection of the aluminum geodesic dome was about 150 people, and total man hours were approximately 375,000.

Some of the tanks were in service by the time we were finishing up the last ones.

By the numbers, the amounts of material that was used on this project:

There were 240,000 tons of stone used for the foundations. That’s approximately 12,000 haul truckloads, 12,000 trucks running in and out with stone.

2000 yards of concrete. That’s enough concrete to cover a football field with one foot of concrete. The concrete was for the concrete ring walls.

60,000 tons of sand. For all the parents out there, that’s about 80,000 of the little green turtle sand boxes filled up with sand.

300 tons of steel reinforcing. That’s about 688 miles of quarter inch rebar. Just to give you an idea, that’s the approximate distance from Orlando to Nashville, Tennessee.

The tanks used approximately 25,000 tons of steel. To give you an idea of the weight, that’s approximately three and a half times the weight of the steel used to construct the Eiffel Tower.

There were approximately 20,000 gallons of paint applied. That’s the approximate volume of a full size in-ground home pool.

828 tons of aluminum. That’s equivalent to four Boeing 747-400s. To give some perspective on that, that’s about ten seats across by 61 rows. Planes are largely built out of aluminum, so 828 tons of aluminum on the geodesic domes, or four of those planes.