Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The Canadian pipeline industry owns and operates a large inventory of oil and gas pipelines. To maintain the integrity and safe operation of these pipelines well into the future with limited resources has a significant social and economic impact. Metal-loss corrosion is one of the most common integrity threats to the Canadian pipeline network. The annual corrosion-related maintenance costs are enormous; the consequences associated with failures caused by corrosion can be catastrophic. Due to its benefit of achieving cost savings while maintaining consistent safety levels, the reliability-based methodology has been increasingly adopted by pipeline operators to manage the pipeline integrity with respect to corrosion and other integrity threats. It is not uncommon that tens of thousands of active corrosion defects can exist in an aging pipeline. In this case, an efficient and accurate methodology is needed to evaluate the failure probability of the pipeline on a defect-by-defect basis over a forcasting period (e.g. 10 years) such that the repairs can be scheduled to meet the safety constraint and to optimize the resource allocation. The proposed project is aimed at developing such a methodology. The methodology will provide the basic analysis engine for a reliability-based pipeline corrosion management program that is able to maintain adequate reliability levels with sustainable levels of expenditure. The research outcome will also enhance the globally leading status of the supporting industry partner, C-FER Technologies, in the area of pipeline integrity management.