Scope is an important thing here. A 50-inch line from the North Slope of Alaska to Montana operating at very high pressures will have a team of Civil Engineers, Surveyors, and GeoTech engineers spend a couple of years picking and marking a route. Concurrently a team of structural guys will be working on supports for a few years. Concurrently a team of stress guys will be working on pipe stresses.
On the other hand a 20-inch gathering system trunk line would have someone like me hiring a surveyor to stake the route I picked from topo maps, hiring arch and enviro pukes to do their stuff, then doing all the above ground drawings in my spare time and doing the pipe stress stuff on the back of an envelope. No Civil types involved at all.
This is the gammut from none to platoons. My last 20-inch gathering job was 5 miles and cost around $1.5 million. The Alaska Gas Pipeline will cost over 1,000 times that for the front-end engineering alone.
David