Posted on 08/28/2014 2:21:07 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Who could have ever imagined that North America would surpass Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas liquids? A decade ago, that would have seemed laughable.
Yet that’s exactly what has happened; and it’s not just Saudi Arabia that has been left in North America’s dust -- Russia has, too.
The surge in North American oil and gas production is arguably the most important development in energy over the last decade. That’s the good news. The not so good news is that North America doesn’t have nearly enough oil and gas pipelines to accommodate its 11-million-barrel-a-day output level.
The famously unresolved proposed Keystone XL pipeline would carry oil from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast, but its future is in legal and political limbo. The controversial Northern Gateway pipeline, proposed as an alternative to Keystone XL, would connect Canada’s oil sands to the Pacific Coast, allowing greater volumes of oil to be shipped to Asia, but it, too, is still on the drawing board.
Both are good examples of how pipelines – considered the safest way to move oil and gas – have become politicized and scrutinized, and not without reason. Despite their reliability, pipelines still lead to an unacceptable rate of safety mishaps. They corrode and rupture, which threatens workers and nearby communities. In 2013 alone, over 119,000 barrels of oil were spilled in 623 incidents.
America’s existing pipelines are getting older and more prone to corrosion, and over the next five to 10 years, there will be a significant increase in the number of new pipelines.
(Excerpt) Read more at oilprice.com ...
SUMMARY OF THE TECHNOLOGY:
It’s called a “pig” ( Sorry to Muslims out there ).
One of the major ways pipeline operators detect corrosion is with a pig, a machine that travels down the inside of a pipeline looking for problems.
Pigs are not new — the industry has long relied heavily on themand the newest generation of pigs, known as smart pigs, is considered an improvement over the pigs of yesterday. Smart pigs give a read on the state of the pipeline, such as cracks, corrosion, and metal loss. Operators receive this information in a control room and can then dispatch crews to fix the problem. As of 2012, 93 percent of pipeline inspections were conducted using smart pigs.
The real innovation comes from the Pipeline safety company Fox-Tek, a subsidiary of Augusta Industries (CVE: AAO), which uses such a system to detect corrosion, as well as a fiber optic system to detect bends, strains and stress in pipelines.
Theirs is its data analytics package. Companies that use smart pigs usually need to spend months doing post-inspection analysis, but Fox-Tek has developed proprietary software that does continuous and automatic analysis.
Fox-Teks sensors gather information and automatically send back confidential reports on everything the company needs to know temperature, pressure, strain, rates of corrosion, etc. in the form of handy graphs, charts and diagrams. It eliminates the need for an army of people to go out and inspect pipelines and then come back to do the analysis.
The pipeline safety market is massive and growing, but one of the major hurdles for new technologies like advanced sensors and software will be reluctance by pipeline companies to proactively invest in corrosion management and maintenance. In the past, they have largely focused on the bare minimum and viewed safety as a regulatory requirement.
I am reading of technologies that micro-polish the inside of pipes and their is also a plasma to apply a Diamond Like Coating that would add a hard coating to the piping. Can old pipes be retro-processed? danged if I know. New Pipelines add these processes from scratch? Sure. The point is would they reduce corrosion and testing and maintenance a great deal? That is the question I’d like answered...
The headline assumes the argument of “pipeline safety” is really about that. Of course it’s not. “Safety” is just a smokescreen for the eco-Nazis. Always has been.
RE: The headline assumes the argument of pipeline safety is really about that.
That’s been ONE MAJOR reason for the Keystone XL delay... Leaks and Spills ( as if transporting them by rail or ship isn’t going to be a bigger risk ).
119,000 barrels in 2013 is a drip out of the faucet. that’s damn good. the sky is not falling!!
42 gal in a barrel
The "safest way" of moving these products has " an unacceptable rate of safety mishaps." The solution obviously being to use methods that are much less safe.
Do these people even read what they produce?
You guys are missing the real issue with “pipeline safety” - rent seeking by political contributors. Obama’s BFF is Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway. Guess who owns a ton of railroads that move a lot of oil, that new pipelines would compete with? I think we can all put 2 and 2 together on this.
Back in the '80s I was a programmer for a rent-a-rig oil company. One of my projects was to write an engine oil analysis program. The deal was to check for unusual amounts of contaminants. (Metals off the top of my head). If there was an increase in barium, it meant the main bearings in a diesel engine were going, silica meant sand getting past the filters, etc.
I marveled that it was no wonder we were world leaders, doing stuff like that and mentioned the neatness of it to my boss, who was a retired Navy commander. He said the Navy had been doing that for a long time and gave me a truism that has stuck with me ever since: "You can't prevent breakdowns but you can control them".
That came to mind when I had to write a preventive maintenance program - inspect this every week, that every month, etc. That was incorporated into a mechanics work order list, so that when he went in to repair an engine, for instance, all the other repairs due were also shown so that if he had to take apart some module, he could fix any other parts associated with it.
Those people really had their act together.
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