A Focus on Subsea Pipeline Maintenance

The offshore pipeline industry works with confidence in waters as deep as 10,000 feet and with that comes the need for technology that can maintain the integrity of these assets in much deeper and more challenging conditions.

In this feature one of the world’s leading industrial technology companies, specialising in creating unique and specialised detection, diagnostics and measurement solutions talks about the importance of subsea pipeline maintenance and how through the strategic planning of these programmes and the effective screening of pipelines, the integrity of these can be uplifted and the original lifespan of this asset can be extended by 30%.

Technological Advances in Pipeline Maintenance

As assets age over time and operations move into deeper waters, the oil and gas sector face the ongoing challenge of ensuring efficient production, extending asset lifespan and consistently maintaining pipeline integrity.

Industry Leading Technology

Through its market leading technology DiscoveryTM, Tracerco has developed a groundbreaking methodology that allows for the online inspection of a pipe from the outside without the need to remove the protective coating or interfere with production.

Developed to provide owner operators with an enhanced understanding of a pipeline, its coating and process fluid – all whilst fully operational – DiscoveryTM has fast become the market leader with the technology deployed on assets across the globe.

The use of pioneering subsea CT scanning technology – the first of its type in the industry and commonly used for non- invasive medical diagnostic technique – has revolutionised pipeline maintenance by providing critical flow assurance and integrity data without the need for coating removal and all in real time.

The revolutionary technology provides accurate sizing of wall thickness in minutes by taking a high-resolution image of the pipe wall provided from an external scan of the pipeline. This tomographic image then pinpoints any flaws within the pipe walls, identifies location, amount and density of any material or deposits and all within a density difference of 0.05g/cc.

Easily and quickly deployed - using an ROV and simply clamped on to the pipe – Discovery TM has been utilised across a wide variety of pipeline designs, investigating both internal and external corrosion, locating blockages and identifying flow issues and is the only technology that is externally verified and field proven.

Independently verified by the Lloyds Register New Technology Process, DiscoveryTM provides the technology for deep water pipeline maintenance, a solution for those pipelines that cannot be inspected by conventional means and delivers an alternative where operators want to eradicate intrusion and loss of production, delivering savings of up to 35% on the cost of inspection campaigns, compared with conventional scanning techniques.

Combine this with Tracerco’s inbuilt fast scanning technology, reducing overall scan time by up to 80% and operators across the globe are benefiting from maximum data capture never before available in the market and from one single inspection.

To date, DiscoveryTM has successfully gathered valuable data across tens of thousands of scans enabling operators to refine and improve the efficiency of existing pipeline models.