At presentthe little is known about the condition of the continental shelves’ transport arteries – the pipelines that carry oil and gas across the seabed.
But now a handful of research institutes and industrial companies from Norway are about to develop a monitoring system that will act as an environmental watchdog.
Four mid-Norwegian industrial companies – SICOMForce TechnologyCorrOcean and Thermotite – have decided on making a joint effort. Also part of the team is the Foundation for Scientific and Industrial Research at the Norwegian Institute of Technology (SINTEF)the largest independent research organisation in Scandinavia. SINTEF has been instrumental in persuading oil and gas companies and the Research Council of Norway to back the NOK41million (E5million) project.
The three-year interdisciplinary project is the first phase of a major programme that aims to realise a concept that the project partners have called SmartPipe. This will be a complete monitoring system that gathers and processes data from pipelines on the seabed.
SmartPipe will bring data up from the depths – data about the risk of pipeline leakssuch as mechanical loadsrates of corrosion and remaining wall thickness. The system will also send up information about flow conditions in the pipelinesso that it will act both as an environmental watchdog and as a tool capable of ensuring that the transport capacity of the pipelines is maintained at the highest possible level.
“SmartPipe will be an important aid when oil and gas are being produced in sensitive environments like the Arctic. The system will also tell us whether a pipeline’s lifecycle can be extendedand if sowhat will be needed to do so. This is important when we remember that the useful lives of many oil and gas fields are being increasedso that they also need transportation systems with a longer lifetime” said SINTEF project manager Ole Øystein Knudsen.
All offshore pipelines
The SmartPipe project deals with both pure gas pipelines and the pipelines for oil and gas transport that form part of every offshore subsea installation. More and more fields are being developed without platforms or production vessels. Oil and gas from such fields are carried together in the same pipeline on the seabedeither ashore or to platforms that have spare capacity.
The four companies are helping to implement the SmartPipe concept are headed by the Trondheim company SICOMwhich is based on underwater communication systems. The rest of the group consists of Danish-owned Force Technologyalso from Trondheim and specialists in corrosion monitoringthe Trondheim company CorrOceanwhich develops corrosion sensorsand Canadian-owned Thermotite of Orkangerwhich specialises in thermal insulation of subsea pipelines.
SINTEF members include SINTEF Materials and ChemistrySINTEF ICT and MARINTEK. SINTEF took the initiative to launch the project and will carry out large parts of it. The research institution has been working on the SmartPipe concept since 2004.
International interest
Four oil and gas companies are financing the project together with the Research Council: ConocoPhillipsBPNorske Shell and the Norwegian company Gasscowhich is responsible for pipeline-based exports of Norwegian gas.
“Our aim is to develop a system that the participants in the project will be able to commercialise. The level of interest on the part of the oil companies makes it quite clear that we are talking about a future product with a global market” said SICOM’s vice president Lars Egil Mathisen.
At presentthe petroleum industry has limited access to data about the state of health of its pipelines or about the flow conditions inside them. Current data capture is restricted to information from sensors located close to the wellsinformation from ROVs and data from intelligent pigs that are sent through the pipelines from time to time.
The sensors in SmartPipe will cover the whole length of the pipelineand the information will be gathered throughout its working life. Some of the data will be used directlywhile other aspects will be used as input for simulations and mathematical models.
“We are facing a demanding job. There are major challenges involved in bring power to the sensors and making the sensors and electronics sufficiently robust to withstand the pipe-laying process and the challenging seabed environmentnot to mention bringing the data back to the control centres” added Mathisen.
The complete system will consist of a sensor package and communication equipment which will be integrated into the pipeline as a distributed systemas well as analytical tools that will transfer the data that have been read in. There will also be a database to store the information and software for presenting the results to the operator.
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