Toward a Fully Integrated Pipeline Integrity Management Software

As corrosion is one of the major risks of failure for pipelines & structures, an accurate and flexible tool to analyze the effectiveness of an existing CP installation within its specific environment is a key element of any integrity management system. Most of the existing CP modules for integrity management are facing one or more of the following limitations:

 

• they are unable to take into account the increased influence of interference as e.g. caused by the trend to locate all utilities within the same right-of-way or common energy corridors;
• they are unable to cope with complex geometries and environmental variations;
• being based on a combination of experience, experimental data and heuristics they do not meet the accuracy level of computer models;
• the rigid structure of existing CP modules makes data exchange with other integrity management modules labour-intensive and troublesome.

This paper describes a unique modelling platform that allows predicting the true protection level of a pipeline network of arbitrary complexity. Combining this unique simulation technology with data from field survey campaigns gives operators unambiguous information of the corrosion protection level of the pipeline, thereby allowing making critical decisions w.r.t. excavating and repairing pipelines.

As a case study, details will be presented on the integration of the platform with the pipeline database from Gasunie, The Netherlands. Gasunie is a gas transmission operator with about 12.000 km of pipeline, most of it situated in congested right-of-ways and presence of DC-traction stray current interference.

It will be demonstrated in this paper that by using the platform described above, Gasunie is able to control and optimize the CP of their pipeline network, hereby considerably reducing the on-site interventions.