For channeling seawater and oil, processor orders giant extrusion line

Moving seawater to desalination plants is big work in the Middle East, and helping make it possible will be a new pipe extrusion line ordered by processor P.E.S. Co. The extruder, on order from KraussMaffei Berstorff, is designed to process smooth-walled HDPE pipe with diameters up to 2.4m.

This won't be the first line that P.E.S. acquired from KraussMaffei Berstorff (Munich, Germany) but it certainly is the largest. The processor has been extruding HDPE pipe, up to 1600-mm diameter, on a range of the manufacturer's single-screw extruders for almost a decade. The extra-large pipes produced by the company in the Persian Gulf region are used in many applications but chiefly in the pipelines supplying seawater to desalination plants and cooling water to oil refineries.

The extrusion line now on order will enable P.E.S. to add smooth-walled HDPE pipes 1800-, 2000-, 2200-, and 2400-mm in diameter to its production spectrum. The processor has specified low-sagging polyethylene XLS12B from Total Petrochemicals for this pipe.