Features

Cliff Johnson, director of Public Affairs at NACE International, The Corrosion Society, recently assembled a panel of NACE pipeline corrosion control experts to answer a series of questions on how recent regulations and developments are affecting the pipeline industry.

In the United States, the annual cost associated with corrosion damage of structural components is greater than the combined annual cost of natural disasters, including hurricanes, storms, floods, fires and earthquakes(1). Similar findings have been made by studies conducted in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan.

To have been a fly on the wall when GE Chairman and CEO Jack Welch picked up the phone in 1997 and called one of his rising young stars, a fellow named Claudi Santiago, about heading a new business segment that would later be called GE Oil & Gas.

For many years, gathering field data on existing piping systems remained basically unchanged. As piping systems became more complex, the people collecting field data were often required to place themselves in precarious situations to obtain the needed measurements. Those were the old days.

The pressures of the financial and economic crisis have lead to a slump in Europe’s natural gas demand. This has caused a sizeable reduction in Russian gas imports – up to 50 billion cubic meters (bcm) in Western Europe alone. Unsurprisingly, Gazprom has turned its attention towards the major emerging natural gas consumer China.

Even with the world having reached a modicum of consensus in Copenhagen, it is becoming clear that the global obsession with anything green has subsided. This is a good thing. We can now move from breathless anticipation of a green dawn, to the more sober work of systematically and thoughtfully building toward a low-carbon future.

The Cockrell Ranch Waterflood project is an ambitious enhanced oil recovery project located in the Texas panhandle. Cano Petroleum uses state-of-the-art technology and methods to recover oil from wells that would have once been considered ‘tapped.'

P&GJ’s latest international survey indicates a much higher number of pipelines in the engineering and design phase vs. actual construction. This year’s figures show the international sector accounts for 90,624 miles of pipelines under construction and planned.

Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) gas, also known as sour gas or sulfuretted hydrogen, is possibly the second-most deadly gas after carbon monoxide that man can encounter in the industrial environment. Common in all sectors of the petroleum industry, this gas can be found in any location where decaying matter is present.

In 2009, Michels Pipeline Construction, a division of Brownsville, WI-based Michels Corp., was involved in construction of portions of TransCanada’s 2,148-mile Keystone Pipeline, Kinder Morgan’s 1,679-mile Rockies Express Pipeline and Enbridge Energy’s 1,000-mile Alberta Clipper Pipeline.

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