Non Technical Solutions for Technical Challenges

Santos Ltd
ABN 80 007 550 923
Santos House  Level 6
91 King William Street
Adelaide SA 5000
GPO Box 2455
Adelaide  SA  5001
Telephone:            61 8 8116 5000
Reliability
Direct:         61 8 81167872
Facsimile:   61 8 8116 5078 Memorandum                                                  

To:	NACE Conference Committee	Date:	8 May 2009
From:	Martyn Cooper, John Fletcher
Subject:	Abstract for NACE 2010 Conference

Santos is the largest onshore oil and gas company in Australia and operates a number of gas plants throughout the country. This paper considers the Moomba gas plant in central Australia which processes raw gas removing water and CO2 along with NGL’s before sending sales quality gas to the coastal cities of Brisbane, Sydney and Adelaide. This paper discusses the process followed to justify a corrosion management solution affecting the CO2 removal plants in Moomba. CO2 removal is via Benfield units which have suffered significant and at times run away corrosion events since the early 1980’s. These events have proven hard to detect, have consumed vast quantities of engineering time and have lead to expensive and time consuming repairs including the truncation of some of the towers. Engineering solutions to stop the corrosion events and manage integrity have been identified in the past but for various reasons were not implemented.
This paper discussed the reasons why the engineering solutions were not implemented and how this problem was readdressed in 2006 through a process of continual improvement. The cause of the problem whilst seen as an asset integrity or corrosion engineering issue was in fact more about managing the organisations expectations and fears and providing the correct justification to enable management approval. Once these “unknowns” were addressed the solution could be planned, scheduled and implemented. The process that lead to the successful implementation of a solution first proposed some 20 years ago is discussed, this involved the application of initiatives such as, extreme value analysis and error predictions of large quantities of thickness data, remaining life predictions and cost benefit analysis.

Martyn Cooper

Lead Integrity Engineer - Reliability

John Fletcher

Senior Integrity Engineer