The scope of the oil and gas industry is multi-faceted and wide-ranging, consisting of several sub sectors that are all unique industries in their own right. The three key areas are Upstream, Midstream, and Downstream and their activities include exploration, gathering, storage, refining, transmission, distribution, transportation and more.
Oil and gas is transported over long distances from the well to the production and storage facilities and then eventually distributed to the end customers in a number of ways. Throughout this journey well casings, pipelines and storage tanks are in contact with, or surrounded by, soil or seawater and therefore require cathodic protection and pipeline integrity measures in order to prevent corrosion and manage electrical interactions with nearby infrastructure, such as power transmission lines, electric trains and impressed currents that are used to protect other buried pipelines.
Monitoring cathodic protection systems is critical to ensure that they are functioning properly and are providing adequate corrosion protection. However, oil and gas infrastructure, in particular pipelines, are often in difficult to access locales, buried underground and/or located in areas with extreme climates, environmental hazards, or within dangerous right-of-way corridors.
In order to execute comprehensive audits of the integrity of an organization’s pipeline network, extensive field surveys are mandatory but are extremely resource intensive, expensive, put personnel at risk, and due to complexity and the manual nature of field work they often fail to provide the expected quality of data. In addition, they can only be performed at intermittent intervals, and therefore fail to deliver continuous performance data and ongoing visibility into the health of the system.
Underground pipelines, transporting liquid petroleum products and natural gas are critical components of civil infrastructure, making corrosion prevention an essential element of a comprehensive asset-protection strategy. If an inadequately protected pipeline, or an unmonitored corrosion event, leads to a failure or leakage event, the operator is faced with many negative impacts, including; endangering public safety, loss of product and costs of mitigative measures, environmental impacts and reputational damage, and possibility of increased regulatory scrutiny over time.
The United States contains the largest energy pipeline network in the world, with over 2.4 million miles of pipe traversing through a myriad of topography, from mountains and deserts, forests and swamps and dense urban areas. According to a study conducted by the National Association of Corrosion Engineers (NACE), pipeline corrosion costs over $7 billion USD each year. Corrosion is cited as the second leading cause of oil and gas spills and is blamed for nearly a quarter of all incidents, and regulators both in the U.S. and Canada are increasingly focusing on Geohazards as a key risk for pipeline integrity and are modifying regulations to accommodate this.
The Solution: Effective Cathodic Protection and
Pipeline Integrity Remote Monitoring
Remote monitoring of corrosion and pipeline sensors leverages the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in any location to deliver a platform with near real-time collection, analysis, and collaboration tools. MOBILTEX remote monitoring platform solutions enable our clients to easily and effectively realize higher safety and operational efficiencies, transformational digital capabilities, and increased infrastructure integrity.
This is effectively achieved through:
- Being able to quickly identify and assess aversive operational conditions and/or corrosion damage occurring – before it becomes widespread and disruptive.
- Ensuring remote cathodic protection systems are always operating in the optimal range for asset protection, and pipeline integrity sensors are accurately capturing valuable data, in even the most challenging locations or environments
- Streamlining data gathering, inspection and reporting for regulatory compliance – and delivering advanced analysis for trending and identifying issues before they occur
- Eliminating the extremely high-cost and safety risks associated with in-field inspection, particularly in remote or difficult to access locations
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