What is the context?

For any pipeline owner, the most important asset is the pipeline itself. The continued safe and economical operation of the pipeline is absolute essential and proving the ongoing fitness for purpose is increasingly becoming a regulatory requirement. Unfortunately, the effects of badly designed or installed cathodic protection systems are often only realized years later, resulting in severe consequential damages (rehabilitation, upgrades, unscheduled outages, etc.).

 What are the issues?

• Cathodic protection systems are badly designed without proper engineering resulting in
  • too high cost of equipment/installation due to over-design: more anodes and transformer rectifier units than needed, deepwell anode locations deeper than required, etc.;
  • under designed cathodic protection systems resulting in under-protection and premature degradation of the infrastructure, resulting in serious long term operational costs;
  • high costs of maintenance in terms of surveys, patch repairs, and associated materials;
  • overall insufficient cathodic protection performance, even in the case of over-designed systems;
  • local overprotection resulting in coating disbonding.

• Cathodic protection designs do not take into account influence of interference as e.g. caused by the trend to locate all utilities within the same right-of-way or common energy corridors.

• On-site survey techniques carried out without proper knowledge of equipment and environmental limitations:
  • leading to unreliable and incomplete data for cathodic protection design engineering;
  • inability to detect/adequately account for coating damage(s);
  • process taking too long and not prioritized towards danger/high risk zones (which can be predicted by Elsyca technology);
  • data not captured in systematic way for decision support systems.

What value do we bring?

Elsyca offers the full range of services related to the cathodic protection of pipeline networks including field surveys, cathodic protection design and cathodic protection verification & optimisation, all this backed by applied R&D studies.

Regarding modelling, Elsyca has developed and validated a simulation platform, that is capable of designing in the virtual space the cathodic protection system for any pipeline network. This allows one to model the cathodic protection of large and complex pipeline networks taking into account interference of DC-traction systems (trains, trams, HVDC, …), power transmission lines (HVAC, …) and buried HV cables.

Elsyca’s virtual design capability is combined with the skills and expertise of a CP engineering team of cathodic protection specialists ranging from field technicians and cathodic protection engineers up to design masters. This enables Elsyca to answer and exceed our customer’s expectations and to outperform any existing technology.

Examples of Elsyca's achievements in the pipeline industry can be viewed by clicking here.