It is known that corrosion has significant impacts on all types of assets with respect to cost, health and safety, environment, community, and stewardship; effective corrosion management reduces losses, extends the service life of assets, and prevents catastrophic failures.
Corrosion Management System (CMS) is a systematic approach to manage corrosion risks through policies, processes, and procedures in an organization; and it should be developed, implemented, maintained, and continuously improved for not only the internal team, but also external suppliers and contractors.
This paper focuses on the lessons learned from the process of implementing a CMS in an operating gold mine. The obstacles and constraints during the process as well as the approaches to overcome them will be discussed. The structured process of dealing with technical corrosion risks will also be illustrated with case studies, including the benefit of corrosion monitoring and data collection for decision making.
In 2001 the UK Health and Safety Executive published "Review of Corrosion Management for Offshore Technology Report 2001/00". This was the first document related to corrosion management system (CMS), which was updated in March 2019 and incorporated the PDCA (Plan-do-check-act) approach.1 However, the topic of CMS reached its peak after NACE published "NACE IMPACT Study" in 2016.2 On May 9, 2019, NACE approved the "NACE SP21430-2019 Standard Framework for Establishing Corrosion Management Systems" with application to wide variety of asset types and well different industries or sectors.3 Those lasts two publications present the CMS framework, which includes:
- Policy, strategy, and objectives
- Enablers, controls and measures (Organization, Resources, Communication, Risk management, Management of Change (MOC), training and competency, Documentation, Incident Investigation, continues improvement)
- Plans (based on corrosion type life cycle, Return of investment (ROI), asset criticality)
- Procedures and working practices
NACE publication illustrated the global impact of corrosion as well as a management system to optimize corrosion control actions, minimize the life cycle cost, and meet safety and environmental goals.2
Oil & Gas industry has been working with Corrosion Management System (CMS) for decades and a large part of the improvements in the system are derived from the lessons learned through the whole lifecycle of assets. However, in mining industry this has not been the case until recent years as there is an increasing need to manage the business impacts from corrosion damage and failures.
