Within many features of the Electro Slag Strip Cladding (ESSC) technique, one of the most attractive is the opportunity to achieve a required clad metal chemical analysis in one single layer. All these CRA 308L, 316L, 347, 625 & 825 types frequently concern fabricators who are constantly demanding for ways to reduce production costs & thicknesses of CRA. Hence, new low dilution and high-travel speed solutions have been developed with the aim to reduce the thickness and/or the number of layers in order to answer to industry expectations in terms of productivity. Through controlling dilution with the parent metal and balancing the chemistry by means of the new fluxes, it has been possible to achieve high quality results with an iron content Fe <7% & Fe < 10% for 625 cladding in a single layer where traditional ESSC requires two layers for the same objective. Also, for Alloy 825, single and thin layer solutions have been achieved. This subject presents an overview of these new developments with details on the applied welding conditions and the quantitative results achieved, showing benefits in terms of material savings and productivity gains.

Recently the oil, gas and petrochemical sectors have been facing together safety, environmental and mechanical integrity regulations as well as challenges associated with the need for cost reduction to improve competitiveness. Therefore, continual inspection and corrosion control health assessments and investigations are key towards sustaining reliability and availability together with value creation through avoiding unplanned production loss and asset failures. The present paper discusses an inspection and corrosion control technical assessment performed on thirteen (13) subsea flowlines. These flowlines supply wet sour gas feed from two offshore fields, gather through two 36 in” trunk lines. In order to meet the health and integrity objective, the assessment covers a review on the susceptibility and control of three (3) damage mechanisms using available literature covering field and empirical data. In addition, a review and discussion on the available and required inspection methods to combat the susceptible damage mechanisms are performed. This review is extended to an exploration and evaluation of (6) inline inspection techniques and two (2) remotely operated vehicles (ROV) to complement damage mechanism inspection methods.

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.