Over the past few years, APA has brought together over 700 skilled and experienced employees into the group with technical, operational and engineering capabilities. This team of people, along with our contractors, undertake asset management, design and engineering, construction, field operation and maintenance activities for APA's wholly owned assets and its investments. APA's operations team are responsible for over $8 billion in energy infrastructure assets with the purpose of delivering excellent service for the business and its customers.

APA's operations team has considerable history in the energy infrastructure industry. Our people have been involved in the construction and operation of a significant portion of Australia's natural gas transmission systems, and know these assets well. This valuable experience is being harnessed within APA and used to strengthen our operations performance and efficiency.

Building a national team

Through the year we have continued to consolidate the operations team with a national focus, optimising, streamlining and standardising our activities. We are leveraging our national presence, thinking nationally and acting locally. Some of the initiatives implemented or further developed this year to achieve this include:

• Building a national operations team. This has enhanced the flow of information, with specialist knowledge and skills in each area of the business readily disseminated across the operations team.
• National systems and processes, including 'permit to work' process, asset risk management and asset performance reporting. This has improved productivity and flexibility, with our employees and contractors using familiar work processes across all assets under management.
• Centralising engineering and network design to minimise the duplication of design work that can be applied to similar assets throughout Australia.

National operations

By virtue of the size of our operations, we have captured many unique efficiency opportunities and synergy benefits for APA, both in our day to day operation and maintenance activities and in our construction projects. Some examples of these include:

• National aerial surveillance of assets. Aerial surveillance is a recognised procedural protection measure to guard against third party interference and other naturally occurring threats. The move from a state-based patrol system to a national one has improved the overall quality of service, reduced flight time and lowered cost.
• Optimisation of intelligent pigging program. An intelligent pig is a high technology tool used to inspect the physical structure of a pipeline. APA benefits from the cost and operational efficiencies available from programming this capital intensive work over a number of similarly sized pipelines in succession.
• National procurement and inventory policy. Realising the economies of scale benefits available to APA in purchasing supplies, capital equipment and contracting services.

The Bonaparte Gas Pipeline project commenced in 2006 with preliminary design, route selection and the work needed to obtain all required land access, environmental and technical approvals. Construction commenced in March 2008 and the pipeline was commissioned and ready to operate in December 2008.

The pipeline is a 323.9 mm diameter high tensile steel pipe and is buried at depths between 750 mm and 6,000mm along its entire 287 kilometre length, with a maximum allowable operating pressure of 15.3 MPa. The pipeline, which will transport natural gas sourced from the offshore Blacktip gas field, runs from Wadeye to Ban Ban Springs where it connects into the existing Amadeus Gas Pipeline.

Despite the remote location and challenging construction environment, the pipeline was completed in one dry season and commissioned ahead of schedule.