Abstract
It is almost ten years since a review paper1 was written that provided an overview of the range of inspection and corrosion monitoring methods available to oil and gas facilities in CO2 and/or H2S corrosive environments. In the decade that has passed there have been significant developments in these areas and this paper outlines some of the more important ones.
For corrosion monitoring these include electrochemical techniques to measure the potential of the internal surface of equipment and ultrasonic inspection technology for real time wall thickness measurements. In the field of inspection important advances have been made in miniaturisation of tools and the ability to rapidly process large volumes of data. New technologies include the use of Electro-Magnetic Acoustic Transducers (EMAT) and Electromagnetic Testing (ET) which remove the need for contact with the surface being inspected and so allow inspection through coatings and without the need for surface preparation. There have also been developments in the area of data management and many corrosion management programs now use interactive Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to visualize data. Several companies now provide software systems that can retrieve and integrate real time corrosion related data. Key performance indicators (KPI’s) are then displayed in simple to read dashboard displays.
This paper discusses these developments and suggests some further opportunities for development.