OGJ Online Senior Writer Sam Fletcher recently interviewed Russell Kane, president of CorrosionSource.com. That company was recently spun off from InterCorr International Inc., a Houston-based corrosion consulting firm that Kane founded about 18 years ago.
OGJ Online: According to information that you provided, US industry spends a whopping $350 billion/year dealing with corrosion problems in just this country. That includes $3-$4 billion for the upstream oil and gas industry, another $10 billion for downstream petroleum and petrochemical operations, and $1-$2 billion for pipelines. And you say the costs are still escalating.
Kane: It�s a tremendously large number�larger than most people or even engineers think it is. Why is it so big? Because usually there is no mechanism to make it any different.
On average, about 40% of those costs are avoidable. Not with rocket science or Nobel Prize-winning development, but just with application of existing technology.
OGJ Online: Why isn�t that being done?
Kane: A lot of people are still doing things the way they did 20 years ago.
The corrosion engineer is usually the last guy invited to the meeting on a project that has been going on for 6 months, 8 months, a year. Finally when it�s just about finished, they bring in the corrosion engineer, show him what they�ve planned and want him to put his blessing on it.
Well, I�ve been there and had a lot of cold stares. As soon as you tell them you don�t like something and you persist, they say, �But we�ve supposed to be done in 2 months,� or �There�s nothing in the budget for this.�
That is the norm for how corrosion technology interfaces with the rest of the world.
Through our website, we�re now talking primarily with those non-specialists, and we�re talking to them at an earlier point in time.
We are potentially able to affect the system when it still has time to be changed. And that has never been the case before�never. To me, that goes right to this cost of corrosion.
OGJ Online: Why are corrosion problems so widespread?
Kane: There are ground water and condensation even in the desert, and under the right set of conditions, corrosion will happen. And some industries, like oil and gas and petrochemicals, deal with materials that are often corrosive by their very nature.
Corrosion is so common place. Yet often times I see people who don�t even recognize that they have a corrosion problem. I wish I had a $20 bill for everybody who ever told me, �I don�t have corrosion problems, I only have maintenance problems.�
They say, �I have to replace this pump every 2 years and it costs me $50,000.� But why does the pump need replacing? Because the housing is corroding up. They look at it as maintenance. But do they ever think about what�s causing the maintenance problem? They don�t look at it from a root cause standpoint.
One reason that corrosion has not been treated seriously on the front-end is what I call the lowest-cost-now accounting system.
Everybody wants the lowest expenditure for this quarter. I�ve seen several cases whereby a production manager or plant manager really puts the screws down on expenditures to improve the profitability of his operation, and he looks really great�he gets promoted.
Then 3-5 years later, that plant is just decimated as corrosion costs go sky-high. But he�s off someplace else now.
Some companies are getting smart. They�re looking it more from an asset-management standpoint. That�s why the push toward online monitoring is really important. It�s an outside-the-box way of thinking.
Most people look at corrosion as installing a probe and having a guy look at how that probe is doing every few months to get a reading on how much damage has been done. Well, if you see something, damage is already done.
What people would like to do now is to really get the most production out of their facility with the least amount of damage. To do that, you have to have very robust online corrosion monitoring capabilities.
And you have to integrate that with the process monitoring and control functions. The operator has to have either a meter or a light on his panel to say he�s either operating in a safe mode or not.
It�s a little different take than the way corrosion has been addressed before. I�ve talked to a couple of companies whose bonus arrangement goes beyond a term now. You almost have to do it that way because only rarely does corrosion bite you right this moment.
OGJ Online: In addition to being costly, corrosion problems can also be deadly.
Kane: It�s the proverbial snake in the grass. You can walk in the grass with a sense of security, but if you�re in the wrong place at the wrong time, the snake is going to bite you.
It�s a very broad subject. Literally anything in the world corrodes in the right environment.
It slices horizontally across all of these vertical lines of business�chemicals, oil and gas, electric power, literally everything you can think of. And it broadens out in some more than others. In petrochemicals, it�s a quite broad segment.
In a lot of places, you can tolerate corrosion and plan around it. But you can�t afford it in deepwater operations. The deeper the water, repair and remediation costs exponentially. It shoots up almost vertically once you get in 5,000 ft of water.
OGJ Online: Every time there�s a pipeline accident, whatever the cause, there are people who start talking about how long this pipe has been underground.
Kane: There is a lot of 50-yr-old pipe out there that is amazingly very serviceable.
OGJ Online: Is there anything that can be done to reassure the public about the safety of that pipe? What should the industry be doing?
Kane: What�s happening in many cases is that the demographics of where people live and where population centers have developed have changed tremendously since those pipelines went in. What you�re finding is a lot of people sitting around pipelines in areas where they didn�t expect a lot of people when the pipelines were put down.
The companies have tried to keep up with that process, but they have limited resources. There are technologies that people are trying to implement to help that. For example, risk-based inspection�where you have a high risk of failure, that�s where you put your inspection money. It�s almost a gamble, in a way, that you are judging your risks and you hope that your models take in account all the factors.
The problem I see in that area is having enough robust models to be able to do that. Risk-based inspection has a great sound to it, but when people try to implement it, they always underestimate how many hours it takes. You have to go segment by segment or unit by unit and document all of the information�how old is it, what�s it made from, what was it used in, what inspection data do I have�all of this data has to go into the models that are developed. It�s a mass of documents, much more elaborate than the normal American Petroleum Institute recommended practices.
And when you have to apply that, that�s the part that I don�t think everyone has come to grips with. I think the challenge with some of these aging infrastructures�whether it�s bridges or refineries or pipelines�is having enough people in the system to be able to do that task successfully.
And the second part is, if you do allocate people to do it, having good information to input. A lot of that revolves around computer models and that�s why we�re spending a good portion of our time on how to convey these types of models via the internet to get maximum viewing.
What�s interesting about gas transmission pipeline technology is everyone felt like we kind of knew everything we needed to know. The big fear there is external stress corrosion cracking, which was first identified back in the early 1960s. Industry researchers really came up with a pretty good model to know where to look for it.
You could guarantee that it would occur downstream from a compression station because of the vibrations. It always happened where the external coating had disbonded.
But then they started to find another type of stress corrosion cracking, back in the late 1980s to early 1990s, that doesn�t follow the rules. It can happen 100 miles from a compression station. They think it�s more related to soil conditions than anything else.
It�s really weird because no one really identified this problem although pipelines have been out there for many, many years. It�s particularly bugging the people up in Canada and is a potential pitfall for any portion of the proposed Alaska gas pipeline that goes through the territory where they�ve identified this problem.
OGJ Online: Is there a way now to monitor a refinery to avoid corrosion problems?
Kane: We�re just going through that threshold. The technology is available, and we�re just establishing a channel to get that technology accepted by the operators through the channel where they buy their process controls.
Historically, the way corrosion monitoring has been presented is in volume. Part of the new technology is that you process the data at the location and only string back to the plant as much data as you want to see.
Some of these guys want just an idiot light, basically, to tell them when something goes wrong, and that�s fine. It can be delivered that way, actually with more accuracy over the short term.
OGJ Online:How did your new company evolve?
Kane: About 5 years ago, InterCorr started the website, providing corrosion information content so that people would come and see our marketing message. Just about a year ago, we gave it a separate identity as CorrosionSource because it had a dynamic all its own. By that time we had about 20,000 pages of content and maybe 250,000 hits a month.
OGJ Online: Who uses your website?
Kane: Every year, there are fewer corrosion engineers. We�re all getting older and fewer. And more and more companies are making the decision not to have a corrosion engineer. We�re seeing more and more mechanical or other engineers being relegated to solve corrosion problems. And these are the people who are coming to our site.
We�ve got about 30,000 users/month. But there are only about 20,000 card-carrying corrosion specialists in the world, and I know they�re not all sitting on our site every month. Plus I can evaluate what kind of things people are posting, the questions they are asking.
We feel there is about a 60%-70% component of non-corrosion specialists coming to our site to solve problems, learn what they need to purchase, all sorts of things.
We started with the oil and gas sector because that�s who we�re closest to historically. But as this grows, we�re going to bring it into a lot of industry-centric marketplaces.