The continuous improvements in the Oil&Gas Industry to deal with reliability and maintainability objectives, higher operational reliability, improved safety, and emergency readiness for potential risk of unexpected events have led the Offshore Companies to be in the forefront of development of design and analysis methodology for integrity assessment and safety operation. The architecture of an integrated model targeting the major residual risks to the asset, new generations of internal and external inspection techniques, real-time monitoring sensors, material degradation prediction related to the actual and future operational conditions and machine learning methods are, as identified from the experiences of the authors, the new frontiers for the Pipeline Integrity Management. The advance in automation process to build pipeline digital twin, looking at new predictive and diagnosis tool by advanced FE models allows not only thinking defensively but also in taking an aggressive position toward safety and asset optimization. Plenty of attention was devoted to the 40 years of pipeline integrity assessment through which the engineering assessment takes advantage from inspection and operational data. Suite of services for an integrated solution including ad-hoc engineering and repair system readiness have been identified as the main pillars for best-in-class Operators. Case histories and integrated solution to ensure satisfactory performance and safety have been presented.

This paper describes the development of a formal corrosion inspection and condition assessment program to support corrosion and asset management planning for maritime structures at Port Houston. A hierarchical, elemental-based inspection approach was developed using visual inspection criteria and prescribed measurements to characterize the condition of coatings and cathodic protection systems for above- and underwater elements in maritime structures.  

The terminal is subdivided for Oil, Gas and Produced Water plants. Each of these plants has number of storage tanks. The age of the tanks varies between 15-25 years.  The products held within these tanks varies, from crude oil, condensate, produced water, potable water, to off spec oil and diesel fuel.

Most of the tanks within the facility have a similar CP arrangement and design.  Each tank base is protected by an impressed current grid mesh anode buried in compacted, clean, sand backfill beneath the tank base and is powered by a transformer-rectifier placed outside the bund wall or within an electrical switch room.  Permanent reference electrodes are installed beneath all tank bases to enable accurate potential measurements. Reference electrodes vary from Copper/Copper Sulphate, Silver/Silver Chloride to Zinc.