C2024-21127 Vintage Pipeline Enhanced Corrosion Management Analysis

Angel Kowalski, Jason Land, Kenton Lawson - Vintage pipeline systems have decades of metal loss and coating damage from soil interaction, pressure cycling, thermal stresses, and other physical phenomena that affects the pipeline’s mechanical integrity. Years of exposure make the vintage pipeline more susceptible to leaks or ruptures. Legacy pipeline systems can benefit from the application of Enhanced Corrosion Management Analysis (ECMA) to effectively mitigate external corrosion-based risks.Traditionally, pipeline external corrosion control has focused on ensuring regulatory compliance with most data ending up in regulatory reports and not integrated with integrity assessment data. Additionally, pipeline integrity assessments focus on repairing the results of corrosion by identifying sections of pipeline where metal loss due to corrosion exceeds mechanical integrity thresholds. The result of this traditional approach is that the cause of corrosion metal loss is not identified and