By OGJ editors
HOUSTON, Sept. 9 -- TransCanada PipeLines Ltd. (TCPL), Calgary, has ordered 500 tons of X-100 (Grade 690) steel line pipe—touted as the world's first commercial production of the light-weight, high-tensile-strength pipe—which it plans to install on a 1 km section of its 63.5 km Westpass expansion, south of Calgary. The pipeline carries natural gas to British Columbia and the western US along the west leg of TCPL's Alberta system.
NKK Corp. began development of the X-100 steel pipe manufacturing technology in 1987 and will supply TCPL with the single-jointed, 48-in. pipe with 14.3 mm wall thickness. It will be delivered in mid-September, and construction is scheduled to begin shortly thereafter.
"We are committed to operating a safe system, so we are testing to see (the pipe's) constructability," TCPL said. The company said it wants to determine the safety factors and ease or difficulty of operations involved in constructing a pipeline using the new pipe. "We just want to see how it is in handling, welding, moving," said a company representative.
Development of high-strength, low alloy pipe such as X-100 is part of a group of technological innovations that the industry hopes will lower project and operating costs while improving efficiency and safety.
According to TransCanada's Alan Glover and two other Canadian researchers, the characteristics of higher-grade pipe include fine grain size for improved yield strength and toughness; low carbon and carbon equivalent for toughness and weldability; chemical control, including micro-alloying with niobium, vanadium, titanium, and aluminum; and process control and controlled rolling (OGJ, Nov. 26, 2001, p. 60). X-100 technology, for example, is based on an online accelerated cooling process that allows rapid, uniform cooling throughout the steel plate immediately after hot rolling.
The results of these changes have led to increasingly higher strengths, cost effectiveness, and improvements in toughness at low temperatures, weldability, resistance to sour service, and ductile fracture resistance. The next generation of steel line pipe is expected to have strengths on the order of Grade 830 (X-120).
Although the TCPL installation will be the first commercial application of X-100 line pipe, tests have been conducted, including a 3-year trial of the high-grade pipe—from four manufacturers—carried out during 1996-99 that indicated the pipe's potential for reducing costs associated with "high-pressure gas transportation in remote environments where societal and environmental risks are low."
A report of those findings were published in 1999 by the UK's BP Exploration Operating Co. Ltd., BG Technology, and Shell Global Solutions (OGJ, Mar. 15, 1999, p. 54).