Five important questions company Board members should be asking their senior executives

So often, companies reflect on how they should have run an intelligent pig earlier than they did, or opened up pipelines for direct internal visual inspection, or indeed stripped away external insulation, or dug up sections of buried lines, all to get a better understanding of what was actually happening at the time. This embodies the challenge of managing the risk of corrosion of pipelines and facilities where the steel surfaces are not accessible in normal operations. There seems to be a strong case for critical pipelines having short stretches of similar pipework in parallel, so that without interrupting operations this type of larger-scale sampling examination can be undertaken. Returning to the motoring analogy, it is like having two lanes for one particular direction of flow in certain places, where you occasionally close down one for detailed examination

There are five important questions company Board members should be asking their senior executives, and which investors and analysts, in turn, should be asking these Boards:

• What is your corrosion management process? 
• What has been your experience of corrosion during the last twenty years, what were the outcomes, and how were lessons learned disseminated? 
• How does information flow from readings taken on site by technicians, through to analysis and decision-making at senior management level? 
• What is your ‘corrosion model’ for predicting where damage might occur, and how often and in what way is this challenged and verified? 
• How does all this compare with international best practice? 

Many on the receiving end of such questions will feel uncomfortable, because corrosion is not on their radar screens. This has to change. The future will need to address improved handling of data and problem-solving, new materials, corrosion resistant surfaces and linings, and better understanding and inhibition of corrosion mechanisms throughout the oil supply chain. That will take good management……..and clever chemistry! 

Source:http://www.rsc.org/images/Corrosion_tcm18-62363.pdf