What is the context?

Sharing of common corridors by gas pipelines and overhead power transmission lines is becoming quite common. However, electrical energy can be transferred from power transmission lines to pipelines through inductive, conductive and capacitive coupling. When a power transmission line runs in parallel with a pipeline for a considerable length, induced AC voltages may appear on the pipeline.

What are the issues?

While there are significant benefits in sharing a corridor between pipelines and power transmission lines, e.g. joint land use, there are also many concerns. The main ones are safety considerations for operation and maintenance personnel on pipelines, direct effects on the pipeline, such as corrosion and coating damage and effects on the electrical devices associated with the pipeline related to cathodic protection, metering and monitoring. AC induced corrosion is a significant threat to integrity of buried pipelines, due to its very high localized corrosion rate which can and has resulted in metal loss of more than 1 mm per year. AC corrosion mainly occurs at small coating holidays on well coated pipelines when the pipeline suffers from induced AC voltages.

What value do we bring?

Elsyca developed a tool that can easily calculate the induced magnetic field of complex HVAC transmission line networks and its impact on pipeline networks, taking into account the effect of phase wire transpositions and hanging catenaries.
 

Elsyca’s virtual design capability is combined with the skills and expertise of our CP engineering staff into a powerful service offering that allows us to answer and exceed our customer’s expectations.

Various Elsyca's application examples can be viewed by clicking here.