Implementation of a Pipeline Integrity Management System at TIGF (France): The Added Value of the Pipeline Threats and Mitigations Module

Author(s):  
Karine Kutrowski ◽  
Rob Bos ◽  
Jean-Re´gis Piccardino ◽  
Marie Pajot

On January 4th 2007 TIGF published the following invitation for tenders: “Development and Provision of a Pipeline Integrity Management System”. The project was awarded to Bureau Veritas (BV), who proposed to meet the requirements of TIGF with the Threats and Mitigations module of the PiMSlider® suite extended with some customized components. The key features of the PiMSlider® suite are: • More than only IT: a real integrity philosophy, • A simple intuitive tool to store, display and update pipeline data, • Intelligent search utilities to locate specific information about the pipeline and its surrounding, • A scalable application, with a potentially unlimited number of users, • Supervision (during and after implementation) by experienced people from the oil and gas industry. This paper first introduces TIGF and the consortium BV – ATP. It explains in a few words the PIMS philosophy captured in the PiMSlider® suite and focuses on the added value of the pipeline Threats and Mitigations module. Using this module allows the integrity analyst to: • Prioritize pipeline segments for integrity surveillance purposes, • Determine most effective corrective actions, • Assess the benefits of corrective actions by means of what-if scenarios, • Produce a qualitative threats assessment for further use in the integrity management plan, • Optimize integrity aspects from a design, maintenance and operational point of view, • Investigate the influence of different design criteria for pipeline segments. To conclude, TIGF presents the benefits of the tool for their Integrity Management department and for planning inspection and for better knowledge of their gas transmission grid.


Author(s):  
Ashish Khera ◽  
Rajesh Uprety ◽  
Bidyut B. Baniah

The responsibility for managing an asset safely, efficiently and to optimize productivity lies solely with the pipeline operators. To achieve these objectives, operators are implementing comprehensive pipeline integrity management programs. These programs may be driven by a country’s pipeline regulator or in many cases may be “self-directed” by the pipeline operator especially in countries where pipeline regulators do not exist. A critical aspect of an operator’s Integrity Management Plan (IMP) is to evaluate the history, limitations and the key threats for each pipeline and accordingly select the most appropriate integrity tool. The guidelines for assessing piggable lines has been well documented but until recently there was not much awareness for assessment of non-piggable pipelines. A lot of these non-piggable pipelines transverse through high consequence areas and usually minimal historic records are available for these lines. To add to the risk factor, usually these lines also lack any baseline assessment. The US regulators, that is Office of Pipeline Safety had recognized the need for establishment of codes and standards for integrity assessment of all pipelines more than a decade ago. This led to comprehensive mandatory rules, standards and codes for the US pipeline operators to follow regardless of the line being piggable or non-piggable. In India the story has been a bit different. In the past few years, our governing body for development of self-regulatory standards for the Indian oil and gas industry that is Oil Industry Safety Directorate (OISD) recognized a need for development of a standard specifically for integrity assessment of non-piggable pipelines. The standard was formalized and accepted by the Indian Ministry of Petroleum in September 2013 as OISD 233. OISD 233 standard is based on assessing the time dependent threats of External Corrosion (EC) and Internal Corrosion (IC) through applying the non-intrusive techniques of “Direct Assessment”. The four-step, iterative DA (ECDA, ICDA and SCCDA) process requires the integration of data from available line histories, multiple indirect field surveys, direct examination and the subsequent post assessment of the documented results. This paper presents the case study where the Indian pipeline operators took a self-initiative and implemented DA programs for prioritizing the integrity assessment of their most critical non-piggable pipelines even before the OISD 233 standard was established. The paper also looks into the relevance of the standard to the events and other case studies following the release of OISD 233.



Author(s):  
Terry Griffiths ◽  
Scott Draper ◽  
Liang Cheng ◽  
Feifei Tong ◽  
Antonino Fogliani ◽  
...  

As offshore renewable energy projects progress from concept demonstration to commercial-scale developments there is a need for improved approaches beyond conventional cable engineering design methods that have evolved from larger diameter pipelines for the oil and gas industry. New approaches are needed to capture the relevant physics for small diameter cables on rocky seabeds to reduce the costs and risks of power transmission and increase operational reliability. This paper reports on subsea cables that MeyGen installed for Phase 1a of the Pentland Firth Inner Sound tidal stream energy project. These cables are located on rocky seabeds in an area where severe metocean conditions occur. ROV field observation of these cables shows them to be stable on the seabed with little or no movement occurring over almost all of the cable routes, despite conventional engineering methods predicting significant dynamic movement. We cite recent research undertaken by the University of Western Australia (UWA) to more accurately assess the hydrodynamic forces and geotechnical interaction of cables on rocky seabeds. We quantify the conformity between the cables and the undulating rocky seabed, and the distributions of cable-seabed contact and spanning via simulations of the centimetric-scale seabed bathymetry. This analysis leads to calculated profiles of lift, drag and seabed friction along the cable, which show that all of these load and reaction components are modelled in an over-conservative way by conventional pipeline engineering techniques. Overall, our analysis highlights that current cable stability design can be unnecessarily conservative on rocky seabeds. Our work foreshadows a new design approach that offers more efficient cable design to reduce project capex and enhance through-life integrity management.



Author(s):  
Casper Hadsbjerg ◽  
Kristian Krejbjerg

When the oil and gas industry explores subsea resources in remote areas and at high water depths, it is important to have advanced simulation tools available in order to assess the risks associated with these expensive projects. A major issue is whether hydrates will form when the hydrocarbons are transported to shore in subsea pipelines, since the formation of a hydrate plug might shut down a pipeline for an extended period of time, leading to severe losses. The industry practices a conservative approach to hydrate plug prevention, which is the addition of inhibitors to ensure that hydrates cannot form under pipeline pressure and temperature conditions. The addition of inhibitors to subsea pipelines is environmentally unfriendly and also a very costly procedure. Recent efforts has therefore focused on developing models for the hydrate formation rate (hydrate kinetics models), which can help determine how fast hydrates might form a plug in a pipeline, and whether the amount of inhibitor can be reduced without increasing the risk of hydrate plug formation. The main variables determining whether hydrate plugs form in a pipeline are: 1) the ratio of hydrocarbons to water, 2) the composition of the hydrocarbons, 3) the flowrates/flow regimes in the pipeline, 4) the amount of inhibitor in the system. Over the lifetime of a field, all 4 variables will change, and so will the challenge of hydrate plug prevention. This paper will examine the prevention of hydrate plugs in a pipeline, seen from a hydrate kinetics point of view. Different scenarios that can occur over the lifetime of a field will be investigated. Exemplified through a subsea field development, a pipeline simulator that considers hydrate formation in a pipeline is used to carry out a study to shed light on the most important issues to consider as conditions change. The information gained from this study can be used to cut down on inhibitor dosage, or possibly completely remove the need for inhibitor.



2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald G. MacDiarmid ◽  
Sean J. Korney ◽  
Melanie Teetaert ◽  
Julie J.M. Taylor ◽  
Robert Martz ◽  
...  

Rights of first refusal and other preferential or pre-emptive rights (together, ROFRs, and individually a ROFR) routinely find their way into oil and gas industry agreements. Disputes often arise because of the complex nature and significant economic consequences of ROFRs. In recent years, a number of reported cases, either relating directly to ROFRs or more generally relating to contractual interpretation, have clarified (or at times muddied) the waters surrounding the use, application, and interpretation of ROFRs. However, most ROFR disputes never result in a reported decision because the parties typically negotiate solutions long before trial.The authors consider current trends involving ROFRs in oil and gas agreements, and how they believe the law and legal practice surrounding ROFRs might continue to evolve in the years to come. The authors do not attempt to rehash the fundamentals of the law surrounding ROFRs; instead, they focus on how the courts have dealt with ROFRs in recent cases as well as how corporate lawyers and in-house counsel grapple with ROFRs day-today. The authors utilize the ROFR provisions found in industry standard contracts to analyze outstanding areas of uncertainty as well as what lawyers should contemplate prior to including a ROFR in an agreement. Additionally, the article examines the implications of recent rulings on the duty of good faith that may affect ROFRs. Finally, the article considers selected subjects of topical interest, including ROFRs in the context of busted butterfly transactions, insolvency proceedings, and package deals.



2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 215
Author(s):  
Ricky Thethi ◽  
Dharmik Vadel ◽  
Mark Haning ◽  
Elizabeth Tellier

Since the 2014 oil-price downturn, the offshore oil and gas industry has accelerated implementation of digital technologies to drive cost efficiencies for exploration and production operations. The upstream offshore sector comprises many interfacing disciplines such as subsurface, drilling and completions, facilities and production operations. Digital initiatives in subsurface imaging, drilling of subsea wells and topsides integrity have been well publicised within the industry. Integrity of the subsea infrastructure is one area that is currently playing catch up in the digital space and lends itself well for data computational efficiencies that artificial-intelligence technologies provide, to reduce cost and lower the risk of subsea equipment downtime. This paper details digital technologies employed in the area of subsea integrity management to meet the objectives of centralising access to critical integrity data, automating workflows to collect and assess data, and using machine learning to perform more accurate and faster engineering analysis with large volumes of field-measured data. A comparison of a typical subsea field is presented using non-digital and digital approaches to subsea integrity management (IM). The comparison demonstrates where technologies such as digital twins for dynamic structures, and auto anomaly detection by using image recognition algorithms can be deployed to provide a step change in the quality of subsea integrity data coming from field. It is demonstrated how the use of a smart IM approach, combined with strong domain knowledge in subsea engineering, can lead to cost efficiencies in operating subsea assets.



Author(s):  
Jan Diederik van Wees ◽  
Hans Veldkamp ◽  
Logan Brunner ◽  
Mark Vrijlandt ◽  
Sander de Jong ◽  
...  

Abstract Over the past decade in the Netherlands, most operators have only developed a single doublet. The learning effect from these single events is suboptimal, and operators have only been capable of developing doublets in areas with relatively low exploration risk. This ‘stand-alone’ approach can be significantly improved by a collective approach to derisk regions with similar subsurface characteristics. Such a play-based portfolio approach, which is common in the oil and gas industry, can help to accelerate the development of the geothermal industry through unlocking resource potential in areas marked by high upfront geological risk, effectively helping reduce costs for the development. The basis of the methodology is to deploy new information to the play portfolio by trading off with the risk of the first wells, resulting in a strong geological risk reduction. The added value of the portfolio approach is demonstrated for the Netherlands in this paper through a comparison with a ‘stand-alone’ development. In the stand-alone approach, each new project will be equally risky, and therefore relatively unprofitable. In the case of a portfolio approach, all experience about the play is used optimally for derisking. In case of success, subsequent projects will have a higher chance of being successful, due to the experience gained in previous projects. Even if a project fails, this may help in increasing the probability of success for subsequent projects. For plays that are initially considered too risky for the market to start developing, the value of information (VoI) of a play-based portfolio approach will help by derisking the play to such an extent that it becomes attractive for the market to develop, even at high initial risk. It can be demonstrated for several geothermal plays in the Netherlands that by adopting the portfolio approach, the probability of a play being developed becomes higher, the number of successfully developed projects increases and the average profitability of the project will also be higher. Five more advantages are: (1) continuous improvement by integrated project development, (2) cost reduction through synergy, efficiency and standardisation, (3) optimisation of the surface heat demand and infrastructure, (4) the possibility of structural research and development (R&D) and innovation, and (5) financing advantages. The advantages reinforce each other. A preliminary estimate of the geothermal potential of the Netherlands adopting the portfolio approach is between 90 and 275 Petajoules (PJ). For about 350 doublets being developed, producing about 70 PJ, the value of the advantage of the play-based portfolio approach is €2 billion for the three main plays: Rotliegend, Triassic and Jurassic/Cretaceous. The learning effects of synergy, efficiency and standardisation are expected to be significant.



NDT World ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 5-8
Author(s):  
Aleksandr Kazachenko

Composite materials appear to be an ideal solution to a complex problem with conflicting conditions: how to simultaneously obtain sufficient strength, reliability and durability of the structure, while providing the minimum possible mass of it. However, non-destructive testing of products from them raises more and more questions. In the mass production of composite pipes for pipelines, the only possible option from the point of view of ensuring the necessary reliability, information capacity of the results of the performed inspection of products and productivity is the automation of the inspection process, which includes special methods for identifying defects. Statistical methods, including capability ratio and Shewhart control charts, should be used to estimate the error in determining the size of defects.



2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 624-634
Author(s):  
Atta Rizky Suharto ◽  
Fatma Lestari

Risk Based Inspection (RBI) has been implemented mainly in oil and gas industry to manage the risk of aging facilities. The RBI plan has also been introduced for new facilities and become part of the design requirements, making it the right time for PT. XYZ to improve their RBI implementation to support the Facility Risk Integrity Management System. This is a semi-quantitative study on primary data collected through focus group discussion using the RBI evaluation parameters based on API 580, API 581, and field observation and secondary data from previous RBI reports, maintenance program, and inspection program. Finally, an evaluation was conducted to assess whether the RBI management strategy has been integrated to the safety and asset management; inspection, testing, and monitoring; and operation strategies. This gap analysis aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the ongoing RBI implementation at PT. XYZ in general while specifically identify the part of RBI and related Asset Integrity Management already implemented and those that still need further improvement. Results show an overall score of 328 of 470, showing a good implementation of RBI. The largest gaps identified are RBI on specific equipment (score=3.0), documented RBI management policy and strategy (score=3.8), risk target and risk acceptable level (score=4.0), and specific damage mechanism components (score=5.3).



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