PCL’s Beeline provides preplanned electrical cable routes that cut waste, keep megaproject schedules on track, and help narrow the skilled labour gap.

At the construction site for one of North America’s newest carbon capture facilities, a jungle of steel beams and pipes rise from concrete pilings, embracing towering stacks in a dizzying jungle of metal.

Starting in the third quarter of 2027, the Shell Polaris carbon capture and storage (CCS) project will remove around 650,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually from the Shell Scotford refinery. The gas will be funnelled via pipeline and permanently stored in a rock formation more than two kilometers underground.

Throughout the Shell Polaris CCS facility, aluminum trays wrap around steel beams. Each tray will be filled with dozens of high-voltage cables.

The process for planning and installing electrical cables and the trays that support them hasn’t changed much in recent decades, though advances in BIM  (building information modelling) have augmented the planning.  

Essentially, designers plan it out as accurately as they can from project plans, but much of the heavy lifting comes down to what’s known as “field run.” 

“We’d get engineering drawings and tape them all together and say, ‘OK, we have to go 500 meters from east to west, then vertical for 100 meters, then back 200 meters west to east,” says Chad Rezewski, preconstruction services coordinator in PCL’s Edmonton Industrial office. “It’s a maze. And then field run is even worse because you just get a start destination and an end destination and a cable length, and you find your own way.” 

Rezewski has used those methods to run thousands of kilometers of heavy industrial electrical cable over his more than 20-year career. He says the process is inefficient because there are constant surprises, like obstacles or other utilities in the way, forcing crews to be inefficient with their time and sometimes even reroute or repull long lengths of pricey cable. 

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