FEATURE PIPELINE CROSSING AGREEMENTS: Lessons Learned
BY MIKE CONRADI, CHRISTIAN KEOGH AND CORAN DARLING
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n January of this year, DLA Piper concluded pipeline crossing agreements with two natural gas pipeline owners on behalf of our clients, a submarine cable owner, and a submarine cable operator. Any submarine cable owner or operator who has had to enter into such agreements will know that in certain scenarios, the negotiation process can be long and fraught with complications. As the number of these structures increases, the likelihood of coming across one of these agreements, or the need to enter into one, will only increase. In this article we set out: 1. what a pipeline crossing agreement is; 2. why a pipeline crossing agreement may be entered into; 3. some “lessons learned” from our recent negotiations, for other submarine cable owners and operators to consider when entering into pipeline crossing agreements of their own; and 4. a scenario where a pipeline crossing agreement is required to be entered into, but a crossing is undertaken in its absence.
In this article, we refer to the owner/operator of the existing pipeline the “crossed party” and the owner/operator of the submarine cable that will cross that existing structure as the “crossing party”.
WHAT IS A PIPELINE CROSSING AGREEMENT?
There are a number of matters relating to the ocean floor
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that need to be considered when laying a submarine cable. These include those which relate to naturally occurring aspects of the seabed, such as its geography, and those that relate to manmade structure, such as existing submarine infrastructure. While each present their own complications, it is the manmade items which can be the most problematic for a submarine cable owner. There are already hundreds of subsea cables and oil and gas pipelines in operation, which are on or buried under the seabed. Despite the best planning efforts, these structures can be difficult to avoid. For example, the existing structures may cut across a submarine cable’s planned route for a span of hundreds of kilometres. Re-routing a submarine cable’s route to avoid such structures may require a significant deviation to the originally planned route of the cable. This can involve many more metres of cable, changes to planned
