A year and three days after D-Day and a month after the surrender of Germany, this little piece of advertorial was inserted by the General Electric Company that featured in the Spokane Daily Chronicle on the 9th of June 1945. In about 150 words and a picture of tensile armour winding machine, it quietly summarised an extraordinary feat accomplished by the British and American industries, the British Military, and the thousands of men and women who either directly or indirectly supported an idea, first thought of as an impossible undertaking.
I was introduced to this piece of interesting history on the very first day of my work at GE Oil and Gas, where my manager decided to play a short newsreel from 1945 produced by British Pathé, about the story of a pipeline that was laid across the channel – an excellent example of what has been achieved so far in flexible pipes.
The newsreel was about Operation PLUTO (Pipeline Underwater Transport of Oil), an idea kindled by Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, made possible by Arthur Hartley and brought to reality by the people of the armed forces and civilians alike on both sides of the Atlantic.
As early as 1942 when the allies were making plans for D-Day, a serious shortcoming was recognised that without adequate supply of fuel, any movement of men and machine inland of Europe would be slow or would even come to a standstill. Various plans were mooted that included transporting of fuel through jerrycans, drums or to use a supply vessel that could be anchored close enough to the shore from which fuel could be pumped out to onshore storage facilities. These ideas were considered feasible but were still exposed to harsh environmental conditions and enemy fire and thus did not guarantee a consistent and continuous supply of fuel. Lord Louis Mountbatten was the first to come up with an idea of laying pipelines under the sea, a proposal carefully considered by the members of the Petroleum Warfare Department (PWD) who disagreed on the feasibility of the idea.
During a visit the PWD in the mid of April 1942 by Arthur Clifford Hartley, chief engineer of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, he chanced upon the issue of transporting fuel and the idea of a pipeline under the sea. Having experience of using pipes to deliver oil across the desert in Iranian oilfields, Hartley knew immediately that the plan would work.
Hartley took the help of the Siemens Brothers and Company who adapted their telegraph cable to conduct fuel instead (the pipe was still referred to as ‘cable’ to throw away enemy suspicion). The progress ran at an incredible pace and an experimental pipe was manufactured by 22nd April 1942; Hartley received the go-ahead from the government on the 29th April and on the 10th of May the Siemens Brothers laid a loop pipe in the river Medway for a test run. The pipe was called HAIS (Hartley, Anglo-Iranian and Siemens). The HAIS cable was made up of the following layers: inner lead pipe, layer of prepared paper, layer of steel tape, jute fibres, all wrapped tightly together with steel wires (armour wires) and a final layer of jute.
The PWD, as an alternative to the HAIS cable, produced another pipe that did not use lead. Bernard J Ellis of PWD and Dr. H. A. Hammick of the Iraq Petroleum Company took the help of J & E Hall to manufacture a smooth bore pipe, using a steel inner layer and it was called HAMEL. The deployment of this pipe was done in an even more interesting way by winding them around a cone-ended drum or ‘Conundrum’ which was usually 48 feet in diameter. This drum was dragged behind a ship and as the drum rolled over the water, the pipe was unspooled and laid across the channel.
General Electric Company situated in Schenectady, New York, was part of few companies that helped in the war effort by manufacturing miles of both types of pipes.
Here I need to stop and recommend you to read up further on Operation PLUTO using the links below. Do not miss out on BAMBI and DUMBO or the pumping stations camouflaged as seaside cottages. All in all, towards the end of its operation, over 180 million gallons of fuel was pumped from the UK to Europe. Hartley went on to other war time projects and in later years would become the president of the IMechE.
The design of flexible pipes has largely remained unchanged but the use of advanced materials and pipe installation techniques has progressed by leaps and bounds and the latest offering by Baker Hughes, a GE company, Newcastle upon Tyne, speaks volumes of such innovation. Using a composite material layer, it has achieved a weight reduction of 30% as compared to other pipes, thus leading to a significant lowering of installation costs by 20%.
[This article does not intend to belittle other efforts used in supplying fuel]
Recommended reading :
Krammer, A. (1992). Operation PLUTO: A Wartime Partnership for Petroleum. Technology and Culture, 33(3), 441-466. doi:1. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3106633
A detailed breakdown of the project can be found in the webpage below:
BALAJI ARESH 