Challenging Pipelines

Hard spots are a type of threat many operators are managing as part of their integrity management plan. Hard spots are areas on the pipeline that are more susceptible to cracking or could pose an integrity concern in combination with other threats. The United States gas transmission regulation, 49 CFR 192.3, defines a hard spot as “an area on steel...

Since the introduction of in-line inspection tools (ILI) more than 50 years ago, there have always been pipelines that were considered unpiggable. Typically, it is a combination of various circumstances relating to pipeline design, operating conditions, and/or characteristics of the medium that prevents a successful in-line inspection using...

Gas pipeline systems are not necessarily designed and constructed in such a way that modern inline inspection methods can be used successfully. This applies in particular to older lines constructed around the second half of the last century. The consequences of this are expensive problems for many pipeline operators because the mechanical...

Pipeline DN 400 Opatovac-Slobodnica of the total length of 105 km, was constructed in 1968 and its original purpose was to transport oil from Opatovac terminal to an oil refinery near Slavonski Brod, Croatia. When it was constructed it was made in five sections. Four of them was already converted to pipeline for natural gas transmission but the...

A natural gas leakage was detected on the unpiggable high-pressure DN 600 pipeline Kasejovice – Mikulášov in Czech Republic after 50 years of operation. The pipeline was excavated and found to suffer from extensive corrosion; corrosion of a similar extent was also found when another section of the pipeline was excavated on the same location. The...

Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) technology with injection of carbon dioxide (CO2) in production oil fields become common method of oil recovery increase. From the first commercial CO2 EOR injection project on the Kelly-Snyder Field in West Texas past more than 45 years. However, there can be significant corrosion management challenges resulting from...

A “lean model” that minimizes uncertainties by simulating only the necessary characteristics for batch tracking proves to be more accurate than complex models that make a plethora of assumptions in attempting to model every single characteristic of pipelines with extreme elevation changes and slack. Energy supply chains require energy companies to...

There are thousands of unpiggable and challenging pipelines running through Europe alone. The integrity management of these pipelines requires nondestructive evaluation techniques, which can be applied without introducing inspection tools into pipelines. Pipeline diagnostics shall, therefore, be executed from above ground. Indirect approaches such...

Pipeline inspection using intelligent pigs is currently the safest and most reliable way to detect relevant defects, to plan repairs and maintenance and to calculate the pipeline lifetime. However, there are still many pipeline systems on- and offshore which were never designed and built for conventional ILI tools and modifications would be...