One of the concerns of environmentalists when it comes to pipelines is safety. Actually, that's one of their concerns when it comes to just about anything, but we digress.
Yet pipelines like just about every other thing around undergo technological changes as in benefit from new technology.
Pipeline spills, owing to corrosion, rupture and the like are common. And that can spell messy more ways than one. Spills and leaks, irrespective of their origins, cause costly damages to the environment and the pipeline companies.
Last year, according to oilprice.com, "over 119,000 barrels of oil were spilled." Many of America's pipelines are joining the baby boom generation. They're getting older. And like their baby boomer brethren they start to creak, corrode and rust.
That leads to new generations of pipelines to push aside the older ones. If you've lived a while in this dimension you'll understand what we're saying. And that's where technology comes aboard.
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 them—and 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.
But smart pigs might not be enough. Enbridge (NYSE: ENB), a major Canadian pipeline company, has spent over $4.4 billion to upgrade pipeline safety. It is spending big bucks after one of its pipelines spilled oil into the Kalamazoo River in 2010 – a corrosion breach that Enbridge’s smart pigs failed to detect ahead of time.
And that’s the problem: despite recent advances, smart pigs aren’t terribly accurate. They also require pipeline operations to shut down (you can’t pump oil through a pipeline if there is a machine in the way), and analyzing the data smart pigs gather can take some time. The Wall Street Journal ran an article last year that talked about the pitfalls of smart pigs, even as pipeline companies continue to depend heavily on them.
So alternative methods to detect trouble spots are needed. One method for detecting corrosion uses a device from outside the pipeline. A series of sensors placed on the outside of the pipeline can search for corrosion without interfering in operations.
Pipeline safety company Fox-Tek, a subsidiary of Augusta Industries (CVE: AAO), uses such a system to detect corrosion, as well as a fiber optic system to detect bends, strains and stress in pipelines.
But the real innovation in Fox-Tek’s system 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.
To read more about this fascinating development click on the link.
http://www.mining.com/web/new-technology-could-end-the-debate-over-pipeline-safety/
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