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Jeremy Barton, a mechanical engineer with Venture Engineering and Construction, Inc, shines a flashlight inside a steam pipe in a vault under the former Kaufmann’s Department Store on Friday, June 2, 2023, in Downtown Pittsburgh.
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Steam pipe dream: Cordia hopes to bring new life to Downtown Pittsburgh’s ancient underground thermal system

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Steam pipe dream: Cordia hopes to bring new life to Downtown Pittsburgh’s ancient underground thermal system

The basement of the Frick Building on Grant Street has tunnels that don’t appear on Downtown maps and have no discernable purpose. One begins at the entrance to Henry Clay Frick’s personal vault.

It is rumored that the tunnels were once used to move money between several Downtown buildings.

Soon, a different type of commerce will flow through them: hot steam.

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Phoenix-based Cordia has been working for over a year to build out its steam distribution system in Uptown and to connect it to the one operated for decades by Pittsburgh Allegheny County Thermal before the latter entity dissolves.

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Steam, just like water or natural gas, can be delivered by an underground distribution system.

Pittsburgh got its own district heating system in 1915.

On July 1, PACT will stop making steam and transition the vast majority of its customer load to Cordia. Then, the nonprofit cooperative will spend the next several months filling in thousands of feet of underground tunnels where its old pipelines will be buried forever.

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Or, maybe just for a few years.

Image DescriptionCharles Wolf, a carpenter with Frank J. Zottola Construction, looks over newly installed rebar in a vault containing steam pipes located under the former Kaufmann’s Department store on Friday, June 2, 2023, in Downtown Pittsburgh. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

Cordia’s ultimate goal is to expand its reach in the Golden Triangle, delivering steam produced at its natural gas-fired plants Uptown and on Duquesne University’s campus.

PACT’s CEO Tim O’Brien, who has spent 13 years with the organization and will soon be out of a job, hopes Cordia’s vision for PACT’s system — “redevelop it back to its glory days” — materializes.

The glory days would have been in the early 1900s, when the district energy system pumped steam to about 300 customers, blanketing the Golden Triangle. Since then, and especially over the past few decades, buildings have come off the system and installed their own boilers for heating.

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By the time PACT signed an agreement with Cordia in 2021 to transition about half of its system to the company, there were fewer than 50 customers still pulling from the pipelines.

Those who left wouldn’t be tempted to rejoin until their equipment needs to be replaced, which could be years or even decades.

Cordia will be patient, its Northeast regional manager Mark Schneider said.

“We’re playing the long game to grow the system,” he said.

Between its two facilities in Uptown, another on the Northside and the tangle of pipelines that run underneath, Cordia estimates it has invested $200 million into Pittsburgh’s energy infrastructure.

Pittsburgh’s underbelly

At some point, when Cordia was considering which PACT pipelines it wanted to buy, Mr. Schneider walked all the tunnels that he could get through. Most are 30 feet underground, 5 feet wide — and jammed with pipelines — and 6 feet tall.

Image DescriptionCrews replaced one of the new steam pipes in front of the Union Trust Building on Friday, June 2, 2023. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

It was a tour of Pittsburgh’s underbelly — leaking water pipes, abandoned wires, chipping paint, the occasional rodent — but also, its history.

That’s how Mr. Schneider learned about the tunnels beneath the Frick Building, where unneeded slabs of the original marble used in the grand lobby still lean against the walls. Cordia secured easements to bisect some of those empty cavities.

While many of the historic buildings came off the district steam system years ago, several agreed to let Cordia run new pipelines through their basements.

At the Omni William Penn, it was easier to go under the building than to dig in front of its entrance to access the PACT tunnel — hundreds of summer weddings would be jeopardized, Cordia was told.

“This is a once-in-a-100 years construction, but it is affecting people,” Mr. Schneider said.

Cordia decided to rehab PACT’s William Penn corridor. It is taking over about half of PACT’s 1.5 miles of pipelines, but is still considering what other morsels of the system it might want.

If you’ve navigated Downtown in the past two months, you’ve no doubt run into a fenced off hole where Cordia’s contractors were stabilizing, remediating, welding, and excavating the slag that cradled old PACT pipes. As much as you wished they were done, they wished it more. The system needs to go live by July 1, the day PACT plans to cut off its boiler.

Steam transfer

PACT was never supposed to last for 40 years, Mr. O’Brien said.

It was established as a cooperative in 1983 to steward the steam system for a few years after Duquesne Light subsidiary Allegheny County Steam Heating Co. decided to get out of the business. PACT was intended to give its customers, which included the city and Allegheny County, a bit of breathing room to install their own boilers.

Image DescriptionCrews replace steam pipes in front of the Union Trust Building on the 500 block of William Penn Place on Friday, June 2, 2023. Cordia Energy is expanding its reach underground by laying new steam pipelines and taking over some of the district steam network that's being transferred from Pittsburgh Allegheny County Thermal.(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

That it kept going for this long doesn’t mean it was sustainable.

As time went on, the organization sunk deeper and deeper into a Catch-22 situation over its infrastructure repair needs. To shore up the 100-year-old system with its 8 miles of steam and water pipes, or to build spokes to new customers, members would have to agree to higher fees. But as fees rose, some left, meaning those that remained had even higher costs and less appetite for increases. The cycle whittled down membership from more than 100 buildings in the early 1990s to less than half that in 2019, when PACT entered official negotiations with the company that is now Cordia.

Mr. O’Brien said the nonprofit tried to make it work in-house. It calculated it would have to raise between $40 million and $50 million to rehab the system. Maybe that would have been possible if Allegheny County, which made up almost a third of PACT’s load, hadn’t decided to leave the system.

“That was the hit,” he said. “If we could’ve gotten them to buy in, there was maybe a way to make this co-op work.”

Soon, PACT will turn its attention to decommissioning the tunnels that Cordia didn’t take. It will pump cement or flowable gravel into the openings around its empty pipelines. That will stabilize them but also leave open the possibility of reopening the cavities in the future, or running wires and even other pipelines inside the old pipes.

The organization put its Fort Duquesne Boulevard boiler plant on the market two years ago and has had interest from developers proposing everything from commercial to residential to storage, Mr. O’Brien said, but still no deal. The structure has clear views of the Allegheny River and PNC Park.

“The problem is, this building was specifically designed to house a power-generation facility,” with structures built into its walls, he said.

Whoever ends up with it likely will have to spend a pretty penny on remediation.

“The property itself is incredibly valuable,” he said. “It’s what’s in it is the problem.”

Anya Litvak: alitvak@post-gazette.com

 

First Published: June 4, 2023, 9:30 a.m.
Updated: June 5, 2023, 9:50 a.m.

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Jeremy Barton, a mechanical engineer with Venture Engineering and Construction, Inc, shines a flashlight inside a steam pipe in a vault under the former Kaufmann’s Department Store on Friday, June 2, 2023, in Downtown Pittsburgh.  (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
Charles Wolf, a carpenter with Frank J. Zottola Construction, looks over newly installed rebar in a vault containing steam pipes located under the former Kaufmann’s Department store on Friday, June 2, 2023, in Downtown Pittsburgh.  (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
Crews replaced one of the new steam pipes in front of the Union Trust Building on Friday, June 2, 2023.  (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
Crews replace steam pipes in front of the Union Trust Building on the 500 block of William Penn Place on Friday, June 2, 2023. Cordia Energy is expanding its reach underground by laying new steam pipelines and taking over some of the district steam network that's being transferred from Pittsburgh Allegheny County Thermal.  (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
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