That the Port of Iberia reigns as a major player in the global oil and gas industry was evident by the heavy lifting going on this past week at Bayou Companies and Omega Natchiq Inc.

A deck barge — 105 feet wide, 400 feet long and 25 feet tall — arrived last Sunday night to take on the first loads of nearly 6,000 coated joints (pipe) from Bayou Companies for a world-class deep-water drilling development undertaken by Shell Oil in the Gulf of Mexico. That barge has been loaded, with nine more barges on the way before November.

The $17 billion Shell Oil Appomattox Deep-Water Project, the oil company’s largest project on earth, has made a significant investment with companies at the local port, according to Port of Iberia Executive Director Craig Romero.

“Shell’s footprint in Iberia Parish is tremendous. We’re very lucky. We have three companies here at the port — Bayou Companies, Omega Natchiq Inc. and Dynamic Industries, our largest company,” involved in the project, Romero said Friday morning.

“We’re just lucky we have good companies, good marketers, at the Port of Iberia,” he said, noting they are building major components for a huge energy project.

“That speaks volumes for our workforce,” he said.

A barge of the same size also arrived Monday at Omega Natchiq Inc. to load Pipe Line End Terminations destined for the Appomattox Project in the Gulf, Romero said. Romero likened PLETs to a fire hydrant in which pipelines anchored to the ocean floor are plugged into.

Reportedly, 10 more of the big barges will be needed to haul PLETs from Omega Natchiq Inc.

Dynamic Industries’ port site has built modules for the Appomattox Project, Romero said. Dynamic Industries, which had two modules loaded and shipped in January 2017, reportedly built three more for the project.

Shell Oil’s reach into the parish most recently includes awarding Halliburton on Admiral Doyle Drive a contract to build a 100,000-square-foot building to store completion tools for the Appomattox Project at a cost of $5 million, Romero said. Halliburton broke ground on its $45 million facility here in the spring of 2013.

Korey Kimball of New Iberia, 43-year-old senior project manager at Bayou Companies, called the total involvement in the project a “Herculean effort” by Shell Oil and participating companies in Iberia Parish. Kimball has been with the company 13 years, 10 of them in project management.

His company delivered some of its product over the past few days. Kimball and Romero watched the work with pride.

One barge holds 196 joints, which are loaded one at a time in a process that usually takes five full days, Romero said. Each of those pipes, insulated with 2 ½ inches of HTC-200, weighs a little less than 20,000 pounds.

Bayou Companies workers filled the barge in less time than that this past week, Kimball said.

“We finished the first loaded at the end of the shift yesterday. We finished a day early and we started a little behind schedule,” Kimball said Friday morning. “The loadout crew did a phenomenal job. There were no hiccups. They just loaded out as pretty as you please.”

He is excited, naturally, but said, “I’ll be a lot more excited when that barge leaves on Monday.”

There will be 10 more barges visiting the local company to be loaded between now and November, Romero said.

The freshly coated joints are being taken to Shell Oil’s eighth and largest floating platform under construction in the Gulf. It will have a semi-submersible, four column production host platform, a subsea system with six drill centers, 15 producing wells and five water injection wells at 7,200 feet 80 miles off the coast of Louisiana below New Orleans in Mississippi Canyon Block 392.

When operational after 2020, the platform is expected to produce 175,000 barrels of oil daily from the Appomattox and nearby Vicksburg fields. The platform and the oil fields are owned by Shell (79 percent) and Nexen Petroleum Offshore U.S.A. Inc. (21 percent).

Shell and Nexas discovered oil at Appomattox in 2009. However, due to the depth, the high pressure and high temperature of the oil and gas in the Jurassic reservoir more than 10,000 feet below the ocean’s surface, the oil giants took their time step by step to determine how to extract the oil and gas in a safe, competitive and profitable manner, according to a spokesman for Shell Oil.

With the ocean floor at that depth at a freezing temperature and the oil and gas beneath it bubbling hot, project officials turned to the pipe coating specialists at Bayou Companies.

Shell and Bayou Companies logged a 2 ½-year study of the insulation system, known as HTC-200, Kimball said. They wanted to find out the service cycle and life cycle and tests included dropping it and bending it.

Bayou Companies readied for the project with a $14 million expansion of its pipe coating operations in 2016 at its site at 5200 Curtis Lane.

At one point, nearly 400 workers were working on the coating project alone, Kimball said. So far, a little more than 200,000 man hours have been spent on the project.

The company also was busy in 2016 and 2017 with 1 million feet of flowline pipe for the project, of which about 40 percent was shipped in May 2017 with the rest scheduled to be loaded and shipped starting in June, requiring 10 barges, he said.

Romero praised cooperation of all businesses at the port, particularly in five areas that Shell Oil targeted as potential problems for passage of the huge barges, which draw 6 to 8 feet fully loaded.

Two months ago, he said, Shell Oil showed video taken by a drone of waterways leading to the port to port officials and Bayou Companies representatives. The Shell Oil rep froze the video at locations where vessels would impede barge traffic.

“For the last 60 days we’ve worked with five different businesses to make room, move vessels so the big barges can come in. They didn’t blink. And they know until November they need it cleared,” Romero said.