Detecting and Correcting Pipeline Leaks Before They Become a Big Problem

Abstract

Timely pipeline leak detection is a significant business issue in view of a long history of catastrophic incidents and growing intolerance for such events. It is vital to flag containment loss and location quickly, credibly, and reliably for all green or brown field critical lines in order to shut down the line safely and isolate the leak. Pipelines are designed to transport hydrocarbons safely; however, leaks have severe safety, economic, environmental, and reputational effects. This paper will highlight robust, reliable, and cost-effective methods, most of which leverage real-time instrumentation, telecommunications, SCADA, DCS, and associated online leak detection applications. The purpose of this paper will be to review the underlying leak detection business issues, catalogue the functional challenges, and describe experiences with available technologies. Internal and external techniques will be described, including basic rate of change of flow and pressure, compensated mass balance, statistical, real-time transient modeling, acoustic wave sensing, fiber optic cable (distributed temperature, distributed acoustic sensing), and subsea hydrophones. The paper will also describe related credibility, deployment, organizational, and maintenance issues with an emphasis on upstream applications. The scope will include leak detection for pipelines conveying various flowing fluids-gas, liquid, and multiphase flow. Pipeline environments will include subsea and onshore. Advantages, disadvantages, and experiences with these techniques will be described and analyzed.

Recent Advances in Pipeline Monitoring and Oil Leakage Detection Technologies: Principles and Approaches

“…Acoustic emission employs noise or vibration generated as a result of a sudden drop in pressure to detect the occurrence of pipeline leakage. When a pipeline leak occurs, it generates elastic waves in the frequency range up to 1 MHz [44] due to high-pressure fluid escaping from the perforated point that allows one to detect pipeline leakage incidents [4]. The time lag between the acoustic signals sensed by two sensors is employed to identify the leakage position [45].…”

“…The operation principle of this method is that cable temperature will change when pipeline leakage occurs and hydrocarbon fluid engross into the coating cable. By measuring the temperature variations in fibre optic cable anomalies along the pipeline can be detected [4]. Distributed Optical Fibre Sensor (DOFS) provides environmental measurements based on three classes of scattering, namely Raman, Rayleigh and Brillouin scattering [64].…”

“…One of the benefits of pipeline leakage detection using fibre optics is the ability to detect small leaks [64]. Moreover, the potential of monitoring long pipelines and capability to accurately functioning in both subsea and surface pipeline networks can also be considered as another benefit of fibre optic-based systems [4]. However, its shortcomings include short lifespan and the inability to estimate the rate of leakages.…”

“…It has been shown that oil and gas pipeline networks are the most economical and safest mean of transporting crude oils and they fulfill a high demand for efficiency and reliability [2,3]. For example, the estimated deaths due to accidents per ton-mile of shipped petroleum products are 87%, 4% and 2.7% higher using truck, ship and rail, respectively, compared to using pipelines [4]. However, as transporting hazardous substances using miles-long pipelines has become popular across the globe in recent decades, the chance of the critical accidents due to pipeline failures increases [5].…”

“…Some authors have classified them into two categories: hardware and software-based methods [34,35]. In an attempt to group these methods based on technical nature further research efforts have been made [36,37,38,39,40,41,42] which has led to the classification of available leakage detection systems into three major groups, namely internal, non-technical or non-continuous and external methods [2,4]. In this study, we will classify different methods into the following categories: exterior, visual or biological, and interior or computational methods.…”