Materials Performance is the world's most widely circulated magazine dedicated to corrosion prevention and control. MP provides information about the latest corrosion control technologies and practical applications for every industry and environment.
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Continued on page 32 M FEATURE ARTICLE NACE International Roundtable Risk-Based Inspection for Controlling Pipeline Corrosion Gretchen Jacobson, MP Managing Editor-in-Chief Maintaining the integrity of oil and gas pipelines and complying with increasingly strict regulations have enabled operating and service companies to extend the lifetime of these critical assets while ensuring safety and protecting the environment. Technological advancements for controlling corrosion—the sec- ond-leading cause of pipeline failure after third-party damage—as well as the growth in implementation of corrosion management plans are serving to prevent the adverse effects of corrosion while reducing over- all costs. One process crucial to the success of a corrosion management program is risk-based inspection. This analysis methodology is used to assess the probability of failure and its consequences associated with each component of an asset. Consequences include risk to public safety, environmental damage, product loss, and costly expense. Risk-based inspection programs revolve around understanding risk, risk drivers, and where equipment is in its lifecycle, and then prioritiz- ing inspection-related activities. To address how risk-based inspection programs have been conducted in the past up through today, including their benefits and challenges, NACE Inter- national formed a panel of three pipeline corrosion experts who answered a series of questions on imple- menting and managing these systems. They are NACE members Tony Alfano of DNV GL, Jeffrey L. Didas of MATCOR, Inc., and David H. Kroon, FNACE, of Aegion Corp. NACE: In your career as a corrosion control expert working on pipelines, when did you first begin implementing risk-based systems and why? Tony Alfano (TA): I would consider myself more of a risk management expert working on pipeline cor- rosion rather than the other way around. Over the past 10 years, I have helped my clients develop sys- tems to support risk-informed decision-making. There were two main reasons for moving in this direc- tion. The first was prioritization. Even for assets with prescriptive code repair requirements, there remained the question of how to prioritize necessary repairs with similar repair timing requirements. Without a risk-informed approach, these decisions are almost exclusively driven by cost and convenience. While those are certainly two important aspects of the planning process, knowing which decisions have the greatest reduction on the overall risk liability of the company provides a more complete understanding to leverage when making these decisions. The other main reason to utilize risk-informed approaches was optimization. Operational budgets are finite, so establishing risk-informed decision pro- cesses allowed the pipeline operators to ensure these resources were optimally invested. This is particularly important when managing assets without prescrip- tive repair guidance, or when evaluating additional preventative or mitigating measures that can be undertaken beyond prescriptive guidance. Jeffrey Didas ( JD): We have always been in a risk-based environment. All of our activities are based on risk and consequence. The various tasks we per- form are based on regulations, procedures, and fre- quency of inspection and other tasks. This frequency has always been risk-based, including the need to determine if a task is conducted too often or not often enough, whether data obtained is adequate or not enough, etc. However, we did not recognize what we were doing as risk-based until we started looking at going 30 APRIL 2017 MATERIALS PERFORMANCE NACE INTERNATIONAL: VOL. 56, NO. 4