ROP blog

This is a science blog for the KPN project ROP(Knowledge basis for repair contingency of pipelines. Summary of the project: Steel pipelines represent the most important infrastructure for transport of oil and gas to onshore facilities in Norway and Europe. Flowlines with inner metallic layers and liners for corrosion protection, so called clad and lined pipes, have in recent years been installed in several fields. Today, there is no repair contingency available for this kind of pipelines, and relevant knowledge must therefore be built. The integrity of the bi-metallic joint during and after weld repair and heat treatment is of special interest. The OG21 strategy highlights the technology gap concerning degradation with R&D priority addressing the understanding and assessing of degradation mechanisms. This is also an important part of the project. The project will address the scientific challenges using SINTEFs laboratories for hyperbaric welding (35 bar) as well as Statoils newly build facilities at Killingøy (150 bar). The welding process and the material properties and integrity will be investigated using a combination of experimental testing and investigations as well as numerical modelling and FE simulation. SINTEF, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) will do the research in the project, and 2 Phd's will be educated. The industrial partners are Statoil, Gassco, Technip, POSCO (Korea ) and EDF Induction. The project will collaborate with the Japanese WPI Institute I2CNER including Kyushu University in Japan and the University of Illinois in USA. ROP is a competence building project for industry within the The Research Council of Norway's Petromaks 2 programme, with a budget of 28 mill NOK.