With regard to hydrocarbon transmission lines, the analysis of susceptibility to external corrosion constitutes a fundamental tool in formulating management plans for the purpose of mitigating such threat by establishing protection barriers that are appropriate for the environmental characteristics identified. This document presents a perspective from the management of the Weather-related and Outside Force Threat as a contribution to the determination of the corrosivity index for the electrolyte by relating the lithological units of soils with their potential for generating electrochemical oxidation-reduction processes that can lead to the corrosion of buried pipelines.
The realization of the weather-related and outside force threat has historically caused losses of containment with their subsequent social, environmental, economic and image consequences for Ecopetrol. The zones in which these phenomena occur are characterized by the interaction of transmission systems with an environment that is complex in its topographical, geological-geomorphological and climatic conditions, and because of the anthropic impact of changes in land use. In Ecopetrol’s office of the Vice-president for Transportation Logistics (VIT-Ecopetrol), a threat management strategy has been proposed that seeks to minimize the vulnerability of the pipelines to processes that can impact on operating efficiency or that, because of their degree of complexity, require comprehensive management in order to guarantee operation at tolerable levels of risk. This article presents a panorama of the work performed with regard to the validation of the threat and risk levels of the assets, the internal analyses performed by geotechnical professionals for formulating the plans for the management of assets and the accompaniment of such in order to achieve the continuous operation of the transmission systems.
This paper presents a probabilistic approach for the assessment of the Weather and External Forces hazard in pipelines using a Bayesian Belief Network. Such model was constructed through structured expert judgment methods for those factors whose deterministic modelling is complex or unknown and existent models for those known factors or previously studied phenomena. For the hazard modelling, three fundamental groups of variables were considered: susceptibility, triggering events and vulnerability. Through this proposal, the hazard is described from a probabilistic perspective, including the uncertainty associated with instability processes, information gathering and analysis and risk perception, among others. A transportation system characterized by its high geotechnical complexity is used as a case study, and results were compared with the current assessment model. The results show that the new model has greater sensitivity to the hazard level while being consistent with both the condition of the Right of Way (ROW) and the hydrocarbon transportation infrastructure.
Due to the importance for the Oil and Gas Industry to have a technical document that consolidates the knowledge on management of geohazards for Latin America, the Geotechnics Project Team (EPGEO under its acronym in Spanish) of the Regional Association of Oil, Gas and Biofuels Sector Companies in Latin America and the Caribbean (ARPEL) developed the “Guidelines for Monitoring and Inspection of Pipeline Integrity Management to Face Geohazards” between 2014 and 2016. These guidelines contain the experience of the different operators in the region, given the highly-complex geological-geotechnical pipeline routes (due to the mountain range of the Andes in South America or the Central System in Central America), as well as the high technical requirement derived from the dynamics of the triggering agents in equatorial and tropical areas. In this respect, this document presents the main results of such consolidation and its dissemination, some relevant aspects to be taken into account in interdisciplinary works with reference to third parties, as well as the new guidelines that the EPGEO has proposed to develop that complement the management of geohazards in a Pipeline Transportation System (PTS).
Geotechnical conditions in Colombia make the Weather-related and Outside Force Threat one of the principal threats to take into account in managing hydrocarbon transmission lines. This, along with the rotation of the personnel who support the management of this threat nationwide, has led the office of the Vice-president for Transportation and Logistics (VIT) at Ecopetrol S.A. to implement a knowledge assurance strategy that will ensure the sustainability of efforts in geotechnical matters made in recent years. This paper presents the experience of how it has been possible for management of the Weather-related and Outside Force Threat, by the office of Vice-president for Transportation and Logistics of Ecopetrol S.A., to be strengthened by proposing a prospective scenario of sustainability and knowledge that for five years has been contributing to strengthening the acquisition of knowledge and the management of the threat itself.
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