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Pipeline Integrity Management Solutions for Non-Profit Organizations
pipeline integrity management solutions for non-profit organizations
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FAQs online signature
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Which US industry code addresses pipeline integrity management for hazardous liquids pipelines?
Enhanced Content - Table of Contents § 195.452Pipeline integrity management in high consequence areas. § 195.454 Integrity assessments for certain underwater hazardous liquid pipeline facilities located in high consequence areas.
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What problems are associated with pipelines?
Environmental damage Pipelines can pollute air, water, soil and climate when they leak. Pipelines that cross rivers and streams are more vulnerable to breaks when heavy rain and floods occur.
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What are the issues with pipeline integrity?
Flaws in the pipeline can occur by improper processing of the metal or welding defects during its initial construction. The handling of the pipe during transportation may cause dents or buckling which compromise the pipeline.
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What are the threats to pipeline integrity?
Flaws in the pipeline can occur by improper processing of the metal or welding defects during its initial construction. The handling of the pipe during transportation may cause dents or buckling which compromise the pipeline.
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What is the integrity of the pipelines?
Pipeline integrity (PI) is the degree to which pipelines and related components are free from defect or damage.
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What are the negatives of pipelines?
For natural gas pipelines, the greatest risk is associated with fires or explosions caused by ignition of the natural gas, This can cause significant property damage and injuries or death. Additionally, the release of natural gas, primarily methane which is a very potent greenhouse gas, contributes to climate change.
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How do you ensure pipeline integrity?
• Inspect the integrity of the pipeline externally Advanced non-destructive testing (NDT) methods detect structural damage or degradation in the pipeline from the outside. Ultrasonics or magnetic particle testing are two such NDT methods available in the market today, but there are several others as well.
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hello and welcome to our webinar today on optimization of pipeline integrity management activities this is the first in a series of technical and informative webinars brought to you by penspen my name is annie ross and i am penspens global marketing and communications manager and i will be your host for today's webinar today's presenter jonathan doyle senior integrity engineer at penspen jonathan has over 13 years experience in engineering consultancy primarily focused on subsidy and pipeline integrity management before i hand over to our presenter i'd just like to quickly run through some housekeeping for today's webinar if you have a question at any time during the webinar please submit it through the q a functionality you will see the icon um on the presentation slide with the two speech bubbles in the question mark click on that and it will take you to the q a functionality you will also be muted throughout the webinar and also the webinar will be recorded and shared with you shortly afterwards now i'd like to hand over to jonathan doyle who will be our presenter today thanks danny and good afternoon everyone uh thanks for your time this afternoon uh as annie has mentioned this is the first in a series of presentations so will be a few topics that i'll touch on quite lightly um will be expanded on later in the series by some of my colleagues so in terms of uh what we what we plan to discuss today uh overall the aim is to provide some insight into how integrity management activities can be optimized so that we can continue to safely manage our assets while also controlling expenditure so our brief agenda then is to firstly introduce the concept of integrity management and then move on to the topic of risk and risk management within that context discuss how risk assessment can be used to identify and optimize required inspection integrity activities and to look at how we can potentially maximize the value of the data and the information that we gather from these activities during the the pipeline life cycle so without further ado i think the best place to start really is with a definition and the dictionary definition of asset integrity management is a system used by owners and operators to ensure the safety of an asset from its conception to its retirement so then moving on logically from that pipeline integrity management is a system used by owners and operators to ensure the safety of a pipeline from conception to retirement so why might we want to manage integrity the first thing really primarily is to prevent harm to people both those that are in our employment and to the general public we also need to protect the environment we work in hazardous industries these pipelines convey you know some pretty serious stuff uh hydrocarbons and other chemicals and often they're routed through ecologically sensitive areas so we need to ensure safety to maintain the environment we also need to comply with all relevant legislation in the uk that falls underneath the kind of umbrella act of the health and safety of work act and then there are specific pipeline regulations that arise from that act for various different assets and industries so for pipelines we're talking about things like pipeline safety regulations pressure safety regulations safety case coma onshore and various others we also want to maintain our corporate reputation protect ourselves as a business from from potential failures uh and convey a positive image in the industry and in in the media as well and then finally of course uh we need to make money uh in order to be a viable business and managing integrity helps us maintain productivity potentially increase productivity and avoid uh unnecessary losses and costs arising from shutdowns so that final topic there about maximizing revenue and profits also feeds into the sort of topic of the discussion of optimization of integrity management activities so if we can optimize what we're doing we can manage our budgets and control our costs and this is particularly important uh during periods of low commodity prices uh but there's also evidence that uh historically safety incidents have increased in the years following downturns in oil price and other commodity prices where activities might be deferred or postponed so it's important that we understand our risks where those high risks are and ensure that what activities we do undertake the right ones and to maximize safety while controlling cost so moving on uh just a few examples quickly of what happens when we don't manage in integrity i'm not picking on any anyone in particular these are just some that fitted in quite neatly with with the topic at hand um in 2008 and on varnish island in australia there was a significant uh explosion and fire and thankfully no injuries but it affected 30 of western australia's gas supply for for up to six months uh the cost of the state economy alone was three billion dollars uh the the gas that was generated from the facility supplied the state's electricity as well so it wiped out domestic gas and electricity as well as agriculture and other major industries and the investigation found that the the failure occurred at the sort of beach crossing section of the pipeline as it came from offshore to onshore uh this is a kind of common hotspot for corrosion and it should have been managed properly and ensured that the risk was identified and suitable safeguards were put in place unfortunately that wasn't the case it was found that that particular section hadn't been inspected for almost 16 years and that obviously shows a shortfall in the risk assessment and integrity management process and a cost and risk that could have been easily avoided another example uh in 2010 in san bruno california unfortunately this this incident did result in eight fatalities as well as the destruction of 35 houses i believe some other houses were pulled down as well several months after the event that was initially mistaken for an earthquake or potentially even a plane crash as the location was only several miles from the nearest airport this confusion actually led to the fire being more severe than it needed to be because no one realized that they needed to shut off the gas supply until until several hours after the event um again there were some significant knock-on effects here the operator was challenged by the regulator and couldn't put forward any uh rational argument as to how they demonstrate the integrity of their pipelines so they were forced to operate with their entire network at d-rated pressure which had a huge knock-on to revenue they had a massive knock on on their share price as well wiped off 1.5 billion dollars and then invested the investigations found that the pipeline contained effective welds it was a 1950s vintage pipeline and the pressure had been continually increased over time to meet increasing demands but at no point had it actually been given a sufficient uh integrity assessment or subject to sufficient inspection to you know determine that it was safe to operate at those higher pressures and unfortunately uh this is what it led to so thankfully as an industry uh we do learn from our mistakes quite quickly and they quite often then become legislation uh the pipeline safety regulations in the uk themselves are the result of a shake-up in uh the regulatory regime following paper alpha which is the uk's most significant uh oil and gas incident to date um and what what that pushed forward was a move away from a prescriptive box ticking culture where things were done purely to tick the box to to a more goal-setting approach and the adoption of risk-based and risk-informed strategies for integrity management unfortunately incidents do still happen and these are two incidents from from this year the first one in july in mont bellevue texas where there was an explosion and fire at a natural gas storage facility uh it appears that a contractor working over a pipeline struck the underground pipeline causing an explosion and fire thankfully no one was injured in that in that incident and then in august just a month later in corpus christi texas there was another firing explosion this time on a submarine pipeline where a dredging vessel hit a propane line six people were hospitalized in that incident and at the time uh the news was reporting that there were four people unaccounted for so another serious significant event that could potentially have been avoided but uh the investigations for those two incidents are still ongoing so moving on then what does integrity management actually look like the figure there on the right hand side is taken from dmv rpf116 which is the recommended practice for integrity management of submarine pipelines uh and if you're not familiar with it uh hopefully you are familiar with the plan do check act cycle common in iso standards uh and essentially the the integrity management process follows the same path it's a continuous and iterative process um and it's common it's common to to a number of sort of asset management codes and standards so if we move on uh this is taken from iso 55001 which is for uh asset management systems and again we can see there's a similarity here with with what was presented in the integrity management standard for submarine pipelines there's many of the same steps and many of the same points one thing to pick out on this diagram is that it quite clearly highlights the importance of leadership from from the top of an organization and how that influences the mindset and mentality of the business and how it manages safety and integrity across its entire asset base so on that basis then the goal really of integrity management is to understand and control our risks on the right hand side there we've got a diagram uh the swiss cheese model which hopefully people are familiar with and the idea there is that you can reduce your risks by adding barriers we want to put as many controls in place as we can robust controls to ensure that an incident doesn't escalate to potentially significant failure so within the uk and i'm sure of the legislation we talk about a larp um and reducing risks to a level that is as low as reasonably practicable now that that has a sort of legal definition as it's a narrower term than practical so we're not looking at something that is possible we're looking at something that has uh a benefit that is both feasible and worthwhile um so there's an element there of computation of the benefit or the magnitude of risk reduction versus the cost whether that's time money or effort to implement that mitigation so where something is uh grossly disproportionate then it's it's it's not it can be argued that it's not required um an integrity management system then is a systematic approach to demonstrating how those risks are controlled and how your integrity is maintained an integrity management plan um some codes and standards called an ims or pims that outlines your approach to risk management in terms of your organization resources procedures and the mitigations that you have in place to control your risks um there'll be further discussion on on the topic of pims later on in in the series of insight webinars so on that basis then risk is fundamental to integrity management and just in terms of the definition of risk what we're talking about really is the chance of loss uh and it is the function then of a probability of an event and the consequence of that event manifesting risk analysis is the identification of hazards contributing to risk and then the identification of the failure consequences and determination of the likelihood of that failure occurring and then risk management overall then is the process of selection and implementation of risk reduction measures in support of ongoing integrity management so we can consider risk management as three key steps of estimating evaluating and managing risk next slide please so this might be a term that you've heard before risk-based inspection or rbi uh rbi is the process of implying uh those risk analysis and risk management techniques specifically to determining the type and frequency of inspections that are required to control risk at an exceptional at an acceptable level within the uk legislation psr regulation 13 states that the operator shall ensure a pipeline is maintained in an efficient state in efficient working order and in good repair and within that definition the word maintenance there includes the inspection so what we can see then is within the legislation and within the code guidance uh risk-based approach to integrity management and to assigning inspection activities is is acceptable and is industry accepted um it is increasingly common but at this stage it isn't universal uh some some uh inspection activities are still um assigned based on a sort of preventative maintenance approach rather than a risk-based approach and that does mean that there is still scope for some optimization in some of the activities that operators are undertaking so another question then is how exactly does inspection control risk if we're going to use that as an effective mitigation within our integrity management system essentially inspection is used to monitor the condition of an asset uh without without ins without inspecting without looking at our asset we don't know what the condition is it's only assumed and over time the uncertainty in that condition will increase which will increase our risk so another way of looking at it is how what the hazard is like like how it manifests if it's a time dependent hazard then inspection will identify the degradation over time and it will inform our modeling um if a hazard is randomly occurring if it's not a degradation mechanism it's a random event then what inspection allows us to do is identify whether that event has occurred or not more of a binary approach one thing to bear in mind though is that inspection in and of itself doesn't guarantee integrity you need to do something with the information that you gather from those activities but what it does mean is that the frequency of inspection does it does change the risk and and gives us the opportunity potentially to optimize our inspection schedule to maintain our risk at an acceptable level but potentially reduce our spend so there are a number of techniques and tools and even various softwares and guidance for performing risk assessments but there's some key steps um that are worth bearing in mind the first one is that uh it will always involve identifying the credible hazards you know what is it that you're concerned about what is it that's posing the threat to your to your assets uh the next step then is to define what what is a failure so that you can compare apples with apples really so it might be that you're looking at a lot of operation at all whether that's a blockage or some kind of malfunction or whether you're looking at a more significant loss of containment where you do actually lose hydrocarbons to the environment and potentially expose personnel to to those hydrocarbons then you need to determine your consequence of that type of failure uh usually this is health safety and environmental as well as economic and reputational the next step then is to determine the likelihood that that failure could occur uh and then there's some computation there to determine what the risk is the product of those two values and then finally uh that's important important is uh to define what then is an acceptable risk uh you have this output from you from your process from your flowchart you need to make sure that that is acceptable and if it isn't acceptable then what further mitigations do you need to put in place so there's uh there's industry guidance out there for for uh integrity management and that includes the identification of hazards and dmv rpf-116 that i've already mentioned has a table of credible hazards for hydrocarbon pipelines there's similar information in british standard pd8010 and then in american code guidance as well such as as we be 31.8s and api 1160 and then slightly more niche ones the energy institute has also published guidelines for uh management of subsea infrastructure and then there's api 17b as well which covers flexible pipelines but in general the approach is similar and what they identify are key hazards uh typical ones would be things like corrosion both internal and external mechanical damage from some kind of third-party interaction and then other risks such as human error operational issues and then other things like fatigue so risk assessment is an iterative process you can work through your flow chart and get to the bottom compare that against what is an acceptable risk and find that what you have is is unacceptable so you need to look again at what mitigations you can put in place to reduce that risk to an acceptable level to as low as reasonably practicable so there's a number of uh mitigations or controls that can be put in place some of these you can say are an inherent they're fixed typically these are the design mitigations so there are plenty of hazards that might manifest that can be ironed out of your design or your system at the design stage by selecting appropriate materials uh a sufficient wall thickness rooting your pipeline away from sort of high consequence areas and things like that um these are notionally fixed but uh there is some occasionally potential for you know the introduction of additional physical protection whether that's mattressing subsea or or slabbing onshore pipelines or in extreme circumstances even maybe re-routing sections of a pipeline and then there's there's other kind of in-service mitigations and i've split these into organizational and operational the organizational ones are i guess what you'd call soft mitigation so they're more procedural and these sort of um cascade down down from management in terms of the sort of um strategy or mindset that the business operates with um training and competency is another key one ensuring you have competent people who are suitably trained to operate your asset and then also having emergency response procedures in place for some pipelines in the uk this is a legal requirement and then there's also emergency repair systems that reduce the potential downtime in the event that you do have a do you have some kind of failure the operational mitigations are things like monitoring online monitoring in control of operating conditions chemical inhibition as well as a big one in terms of controlling the risk of internal corrosion cathodic protection for external corrosion and then finally inspection as well and maintenance activities so those as i've mentioned before there's various types of risk assessments and then they do kind of vary in in terms of complexity uh most basic form is qualitative where risk is subjective um and can be based on things like rule of thumb or expert judgment um and then move moving further along the complexity we move towards sort of semi-quantitative risk assessment methods that involve some more complex computation but they're maybe not fully quantitative and then finally quantitative risk assessment where you're calculating your risk based on numerical estimates of probability and consequence um so that's the sort of goal really to have to reach that level but uh typically there isn't as much data available to perform that type of assessment so typically we sort four more within the semi quantitative risk assessment area where you use the data that you do have available and then rely on rule of rules of thumb and expert judgment to fill in those gaps in in data data management is fundamental to integrity management as a whole and uh risk assessment as well uh thinking back to the san bruno uh incident that i shared earlier uh data management was was found to be quite a significant contributing factor to the failure whereby the the operator had very poor records um and that contributed to them not fully understanding the risks posed to their pipelines and resulted in a failure so moving on once you've performed your risk assessment and you have your risk output you know where your highest risks are and what mitigations you want to put in place to control those the next step is to then move on to assigning your inspection intervals this is where you're you're looking at the kind of capex activities that you want to undertake to maintain the asset condition there's published guidance available in terms of what is an appropriate inspection interval and there's recommended practices as well and there's plenty of engineering judgment that can be used there as well which is perfectly acceptable within within the legislation in the uk there's there's plenty to be said for for experience in terms of of knowing the risks and understanding when when inspection and other maintenance activities need to be performed there are cost-benefit approaches that can be performed these have been developed for various reasons qra in particular um has seen quite quite significant development of cost benefit approaches and these can be applied in different ways uh to assign um the different integrity management activities the key really is to try and link as best we can the risk output with the activities we want to perform to ensure that we're optimizing what we're doing uh on an annual basis so the pen spin risk based inspection approach uh the perme model uh allows us to to have that direct link between the uh inspection interval that's assigned and the risk that's been output and that helps us show how risk can be controlled at an acceptable level uh specifically for hazards where inspection is firstly possible and where it can be seen to actively contribute to the control of risk and also where that that inspection then is carried out as as recommended or where required where inspection is not carried out we can also use this approach to to measure the increase in risk and whether we still remain you know within a tolerable level or whether inspection or some other integrity activity needs to be performed um and where inspection isn't is impossible then we can determine what the essentially unmitigated risk is and if that is unacceptable then that's where we need to look at other potential controls to to reduce that risk to an acceptable level so where this benefit benefits the operator is it provides a level of rigor that might not be available uh through more qualitative um engineering judgment based uh approaches um i've sat through a number of uh risk assessment workshops in the past where if they they can take a number of days and involve a number of experts and personnel and if those personnel change throughout the workshop or that workshop takes several days um what you can find is a potential lack of consistency throughout quite a complex risk assessment uh this kind of structured approach that we've developed within penn span and allows us to ensure that uh things are repeatable and and the outputs are more easily justifiable so in terms of what that process looks like it's very similar to the to the flowchart i flagged up earlier um i think the key things really are are to um segment your pipeline or your system and to interes into this parts that share common uh common hazards or common design or common in in terms of location or threat and then the next difference really is is the definition of of the hazard failure characteristics whether we're talking about time dependent hazard or random hazards there is some guidance out there that also talks about um resident threats uh a sort of third category but but typically these are things like manufacturing defects where if they are going to contribute to a failure it's typically through some kind of time-based degradation mechanisms such as fatigue and so typically we would class these under under as a time-dependent hazard rather than a third category moving down the flow chart again it's with any risk assessment methodology you're comparing your probability of failure with the consequence of failure to determine your risk and then ensuring that that remains acceptable and i'll put in an inspection interval based on that based on that risk profile next slide so a key part of this process then is determining what is a tolerable risk and that allows us to determine uh what the probability of failure can be for a fixed consequence and still remaining within within that tolerant risk tolerability level uh so essentially what we're saying then is for a higher probability of failure we can only tolerate a lower consequence or conversely for a low consequence we can tolerate a higher probability of failure and then for a high consequence of failure we can't tolerate the same probability of that failure occurring in order to maintain a consistent level of risk throughout the system so moving on again there's there's published guidance on what is acceptable or tolerable probability of failure on the right hand side there is um the risk tolerability carrot um that's generated from hse's uh document reducing risks protecting people or r2p2 and that gives us some orders of magnitude of failure probabilities that are considered to be tolerable both from an individual point of view and a societal point of view and then again on the left-hand side referring back to dmv rpf-116 there's some more sort of rules of thumb in terms of orders of magnitude of um probabilities of failure and we can use these to inform our kind of risk a terrible risk level so moving on so the output from our pen span rbi uh model is is a typical kind of five by five um boston square matrix this is uh typically only because it's familiar to most users it's consistent with the published guidance in terms of being five by five it gives you a clear visual representation of what your risk profile looks like and you can look at this from an asset level or an individual segment level or a hazard level and what it shows us essentially is that along the diagonal is where we have our tolerable risk limit with a higher consequence we can only tolerate low probabilities and for low consequence events we can tolerate a much higher probability and still be at a tolerable risk level um the perbe methodology that we've developed is quite flexible so we can amend the the output to to align with with operators corporate risk matrices which uh over time have become slightly more complex or more refined um we've seen six by six or six by eight or alpha numeric risk outputs and again we can overlay overlay this output to ensure that we are consistent with the corporate risk matrix while still remaining on that total risk limit moving on so briefly just uh a quick overview of how the uh the risk assessment process works uh for time dependent hazards we can consider uh an estimate of time to failure there's various models that can be developed for um the different hazards that can be cited it can be considered time dependent whether that's corrosion or fatigue or some kind of combination of the two these can be complex or they can be relatively simple essentially the the diagram there shows what we have quite a simple deterministic estimate of of remaining life over time and uh in reality there are some unknowns uncertainties some conservatisms in that estimate so in reality what we have then is is more of a distribution rather than a fixed point in time so by considering it as a distribution um and the consequence in our estimate of that remaining life we can then consider then a probability of failure rather than a single deterministic point in time moving on so i'm not expert in bayesian statistics but essentially what that distribution allows us to do is to present the potential the probability of uh failure as a as a cumulative cumulative probability of failure and if we have a a fixed um total risk level and a known consequence of that particular failure then we can determine what the acceptable probability is to maintain risk at that tolerable level and essentially then that tells us for a fixed consequence how far up that cumulative probability curve we can go before the risk of failure occurring exceeds that tolerable limit so essentially then if we have that information available what we can do then is assign an inspection interval that allows us to go back and confirm the condition of our assets before we reach that point where uncertainty is such that the risk of of the pipeline having failed is greater than the tolerable level and of course we want to set this inspection interval um at a point where that gives us time to act on what we find um and what that what that information then allows us to do is to go back accepting that risk assessment and integrity management is the initiative process and feedback the findings from that inspection into our model and potentially refine refine the model and whereabouts we are on that failure curve over time and then that allows us to then determine when the next inspection is due so moving on to random hazards uh essentially there's two steps to this uh the first one is that you require some kind of initiating event uh in order for failure to be to be credible uh and then once that damage has been introduced to your asset there there will be some time to to failure um and and that that that then is similar to what we've seen for the time dependent hazard so we can combine those two curves and that gives us a similar kind of cumulative probability curve to what we saw for the time dependent hazard slightly modified to account for the fact that there's this an initiating event that needs to occur before before degradation so for uh for for impact events that result in instantaneous failure then there's obviously some limitation in terms of uh how long you have before that that initiating event before you need to to inspect and identify it so that that's potentially an example of where inspection isn't isn't the the best method for controlling your risk and there's potentially some other alternative mitigations that should be considered but for those events where damage is introduced and it will degrade over time then again this this process allows us to assign uh an inspection interval where we can go and confirm asset condition before before the the probability of the asset failing exceeds the sort of tolerable risk level in terms of um the probability of an incident occurring in the first place there's various um industry failure data available and that can be used as a baseline in the uk offshore there's parlock and more globally there's ogp has a similar sort of failure data set uh i'm sure in the uk ucopa retains um failure data for control pipelines and uh similarly in europe there's uh e-gig and konkawwi uh datasets um so we can we can use these as a as our first point of determining what the potential for or for some kind of impact damage being and then we potentially we can modify this if if sufficient uh company specific data is available or even depending on how long an asset has been operated asset specific data so for for a random hazard then we can consider the the uh the curve to be like a sawtooth um over time the uncertainty in the condition of the pipeline increases until we reach our kind of risk tolerability level uh at which point we then inspect and if we find that there's been no damage then then our cumulative failure probability resets to zero and we start again if if the inspection finds that there has been some kind of damage introduced then potentially then that saw two starts to shorten over time um or we can consider it as a time dependent failure mechanism instead and apply apply a different approach to to modeling time to failure and determining a suitable inspection frequency so moving on then just to summarize uh the the the penn spend approach um inspection can be used to limit failure probability and control risk uh there's there's various methods for performing risk assessment and there's various rules of thumb or or approaches for determining um a suitable inspection interval for for a particular pipeline uh but the perbe approach allows us to directly link those inspection intervals to the risk success and gives us the opportunity then to optimize our inspection schedule um based on based on the the the risk assessment output so the key then obviously is to ensure that inspections are scheduled such that we don't exceed the acceptable failure probability to maintain risk at a tolerable level and then after each inspection the uncertainty in our asset condition is reset and we we can revise our predictions um in terms of the time dependent uh degradation model or for random hazards we can reset our cumulative probability value back to zero uh in terms of the benefit of this um we've recently carried out a project for uh for a uk offshore operator who are performing uh three yearly offshore inspection campaigns for for all of their assets uh what we found when we reassessed um their risks using using this pen spend approach that a number of inspections could be uh pushed out while still retaining a tolerable risk level and this essentially means that in future their uh inspection campaigns will be shorter because there will be fewer inspection activities required on a three yearly basis and potentially for some of their assets that were nearing end of life it avoids potentially an entire campaign needed to be performed before we reach that end of life so for the cost of the study of broadly in line with a single dsv day we've potentially saved that operator several times that amount of money over the remaining life cycle of their assets okay so moving on uh once we've performed our risk assessment and we've determined our inspection schedule we then need to actually then inspect and there's a variety of different techniques technologies and approaches available for carrying out inspections and determining asset condition and these will very much depend on what the asset is where it's located and the types of hazards that are being inspected for i think it's worth reiterating that the type of hazard is is important in terms of determining what inspection is suitable or inspection is going to identify signs of that hazard a former colleague of mine would quite often tell the story of an operator who he audited and found that he'd visually inspected his pig traps quite religiously every six months for the last 20 years but he'd never actually performed any non-destructive examination of the of the trap when my colleague informed him that fatigue failure of branch pipe work and nozzles was quite common on pig traps and that ut inspection was was commonly performed and in fact in this case form part of the written scheme of examination for their pig traps um they were quite surprised by that and immediately went and carried out some ndt what they found was that there were some very small cracks on there on their pig trap that they would never have ever identified through visual inspection and could have potentially continued to grow to a point of failure under operation where there could have potentially been personnel in the vicinity uh so there's a lesson there that um yeah inspection isn't to be all and end all you need to make sure that you're carrying out the right inspection and then you actually do something useful with that inspection findings as well so again as i said there the uh type type of inspection um is an important factor in in identifying your hazards and showing you the right information about your pipeline uh moving on to the next slide uh the the the location uh of your assets will have a quite a big impact on on the the techniques and tools that are available to you um inline inspection is a kind of common uh comprehensive option for for carrying out inspection and it will inspect for a number of different types of hazards both internally and externally um it is still important to ensure that you're selecting the correct technology because not all the technologies will identify the same types of hazards so for instance if you have a risk of cracking uh you might not ever detect that with a traditional mfl you might need to run a specific crack detection tool and these are the kind of things that pence pen as a consultancy can support operators in ascertaining um what tools and technology is available on the market what's suitable for them the types of vendors that are available in the markets as well the number of pipelines that might be determined as unpickable has reduced over the last 10 or 20 years as inspection vendors have developed more uh novel and bespoke solutions but there are still instances where ili is impossible and then again there's an opportunity for alternative inspection methods to be adopted so offshore there's some challenges in terms of even conducting visual inspections i think traditionally rope access uh teams were required to inspect things like risers or and riser clamps and what we're finding is that increasingly drone surveys or unmanned aerial vehicles as they're called uh are being used and that that allows for more rapid um visual inspection to be conducted uh there's obviously a lot lower risk and potentially it can be launched in in worse weather conditions as well and what that allows you to do is carry out a sort of visual inspection and then if if that inspection determines that there's a requirement for further inspection that can be when you use your rope access team to either conduct some kind of non-destructive examination or carry out fabric maintenance or or some other type of repair we've seen the same already subsea where divers have increasingly been phased out and rov has increasingly been used again the technology there is advancing and we're moving towards um autonomous auto underwater vehicles as well that don't require a tether to a vessel and then there's other developments such as um increasing the the speed at which data can be collected to allow campaigns to be performed over a shorter period and save save on vessel day rate and so we've moved from things like two two-dimensional sites gun sonar to three-dimensional multi-beam and then hybrid technology such as multi-beam paired with things like photogrammetry or lidar which allows for even more refined uh images to be captured um while still performing sort of fast flybys so there can be issues with that um i've seen sort of first-hand problems where where um sort of large amounts of data require a lot of processing um in one instance i saw a pipeline actually smoothed out of the xy data completely and all that all the uh all the survey contractors could provide was was was a seabed uh profile which wasn't very useful to a pipeline operator so it is still important to ensure that you're choosing the right the right technology for for the situation that you find yourself in so as i've said before inspection on its own doesn't actually guarantee integrity we do actually need to make sure that some kind of suitable assessment is performed uh of the data that's been gathered from from inspection or monitoring activities uh so there's a variety of of hazards that can be inspected for things like metal loss whether that's corrosion or or other or other means of metal loss fatigue and fracture and buckling denting from from some kind of third-party interaction and then subsea spanning as well and the type the type of inspection uh and the the type of data that you can actually uh recover from those inspections will inform the types of uh assessments that you can perform and and how much value you can you can derive from having perform then penn span is the author and manages the pdam jip which outlines best practice for pipeline defect assessment so we can provide a number of consultancy services in terms of assessing defects that are found through inspection or other or other monitoring and then in september penspen then launched thea which is an online cloud-based integrity management solution the aim of which is to help operators maximize the value of the data that they gather from operation um and inspection and also allowing for for more rapid assessment of defects and that will hopefully support more rapid decision making in the context of pipeline integrity as i've mentioned a couple of times now data management is a key element of integrity management and thea will hopefully help operators in managing their data and aligning their data so that they can maximize the the value of the different data sets that they retain uh through operation and inspection another benefit really in terms of the improvement in the speed at which assessment is can be performed is not only does it give you faster answers but it also means that you can perform more complex assessments where they might have previously been cost prohibitive or time prohibitive and what that means is the more the more complex and refined your assessment can be the more refined an answer that you can output from that assessment and potentially avoid what would have been an unnecessary repair or what might have been an unnecessary inspection if in fact the the condition of the asset is such that you can push out that inspection until for another year or two uh so i think as i mentioned before and as annie mentioned at the start this is just one in a series of of insights so there'll be there'll be future webinars that will go into a bit more detail about uh about um about fear in particular and defect assessment in general so then just to complete the loop really uh we've been moving around the integrity management loop from from risk assessment and planning through uh actually executing our inspections assessing those and accessing the findings from those activities and then implementing uh the the findings from from those assessments uh the key thing as i've said is data and uh ensuring that that data is is passed around the loop that it's captured and that informs your future decision making uh to ensure that you you fully understand the condition of your asset uh and that your your risk assessment is a true reflection of the current condition of your pipeline so then just to summarize so hopefully what i've made clear then is that the goal of integrity management is first and foremost to understand and control your risks that means the risk assessment is fundamental to integrity management a risk-based approach to integrity and risk-based inspection is acceptable under the uk legislation and it is also found in a lot of code guidance by directly linking risk to the frequency or the periodicity of the integrity management activities that you can perform you can ensure that those activities are optimized and that you're only performing the activities that you need to perform at the frequency that they should be performed to maintain your risk at a tolerable level again i'm going to mention that inspection alone doesn't guarantee integrity you need to make sure the data that you're recording is reliable accurate and it's useful and that you then do something with that data uh whether that's review it or conduct an assessment if you find that there are defects in your assets and then the key thing then is to make sure that the findings from that inspection from that assessment is fed back in to your risk assessment through the integrity management loop so that it can inform your future risk assessment and future integrity needs
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