Piping Material Estimate

In all oil & gas projects, there are several pipes going in and out of the various equipment items helping the process and utility fluids to move around in the required direction and destination. This piping forms a major portion of the final plant and the cost estimate. There are several piping items such as: pipes, fittings of various kinds, flanges of various kinds, valves of various kinds, and the corresponding gaskets and fasteners. There could be several sizes and pressure ratings of the various piping items. And then there may also be various metallurgies involved. The material take-offs are generally done separately for various lines, which means, similar items could be repeated several times. The whole list is generally very long by the time it comes for estimating.

The piping estimator then tries to find the cost of individual line items from the in-house database and invariably takes a long time to find an exact match for the material, size and schedule of a specific piping item. If the company has previously used similar items in another recent project, then there might be a possibility of getting some in-house data, but even then, it might not be available for all items. The team might end up factoring those items from another nearby size and/or schedule. This whole process is very laborious. Even with databases and software, no company could have an exhaustive databank of prices of all possible piping items.