Reasons To Get a Pipeline Inspection

Pipelines are integral to daily life, even if many people don’t realize it. They transport crucial materials, such as oil, from one location to another in an efficient and safe way. It’s a great method for transporting liquids across great distances.

If you work with or own a pipeline, then you know how important maintenance is to avoiding disasters. Pipelines are subject to strict regulations for the safety of communities and the environments around them. But they’re also made of metal, which can face deterioration through corrosion. You can do your best to maintain your pipeline properly, but when a pipeline faces an issue or develops rust, the results can prove devastating and costly. Check out the most compelling reasons to get a pipeline inspection.

It Keeps You on Schedule

When a pipeline faces issues, it often means your delivery system can’t maintain its existing export delivery schedule. Repairs are often more costly than maintenance, and they can take much longer to complete. The downtime for a broken or ruptured pipeline is exponentially longer than the downtime for short, routine maintenance or inspections.

Adhering to strict inspections keeps your business on schedule by providing the tools to ensure that the operation continues running smoothly. A pipeline cathodic protection survey ensures that small issues don’t fester and impact the schedule later in your pipeline’s lifetime.

It Maintains Structural Integrity

When you invest in regular pipeline inspections, you can breathe easy knowing your pipeline is strong and safe to use. Over time, rust can form, and slowly—or rapidly, in some cases—deteriorate your structure. This deterioration is very dangerous, as it can lead to leaks that affect the local environment and communities, especially if your pipeline contains hazardous liquid.

Structural integrity is vital to your business, as pipeline leaks can cause a company to acquire a bad reputation. The company then has to work tirelessly to correct its image, and it can negatively impact the company’s existence as a whole. Repairing leaks is also costly and time consuming. Your operation must crease until repairs are completed.

Pro Tip: Your structure must be sound to function. Metal, like most other substances, deteriorates over time. There are ways to prolong its life, but replacement is inevitable, and planning ahead makes the process go much smoother.

It Identifies High-Risk Areas

Discovering the most corrosion-prone areas can benefit you immensely. This is the most important aspect of maintaining a pipeline. Identifying these vulnerable areas helps to more accurately forecast their future concerning corrosion. Knowing this information allows you to act preemptively with the best course of action for corrosion prevention.

When you know the most at-risk areas of your pipeline, you can invest in the right corrosion prevention method for that particular area and risk level. These inspections take the mystery out of pipeline preventative maintenance and tell you exactly what you need to do to lower the risk of corrosion in sensitive areas.

For example, you may build a pipeline into soil with low resistivity. If this is the case, professionals may need to install a cathodic protection system to mitigate corrosion concerns. If you stay on top of this, you can protect your metal structure and prolong its service life.

It Saves Time and Money

Investing in preventative maintenance has upfront costs, but it ultimately saves time and money in the long run. As mentioned previously, there are many ways corrosion and other issues within your pipeline can slow down your schedule and derail your delivery system’s efficiency.

Whenever there is a slow or stop to service, it costs your company greatly. You’re losing the money you’d make if your pipeline was running on schedule and losing money to a costly and time-consuming repair.

Preventing major issues and repairs that slow your schedule completely is entirely possible. Investing in pipeline inspections on a regular basis helps to identify issues while they’re still minuscule, so you don’t have to worry about them persisting and worsening over time.

It’s much more cost efficient to invest in regular inspections and small fixes or additional prevention methods than it is to pay for major repairs on preventable problems.

Pro Tip: Keeping up with the lower costs of inspections and repairs saves money in the long run because there are fewer large repairs necessary. Catching issues before they begin to spiral saves tons of money over the lifetime of the pipeline.

It Keeps You Compliant

Pipelines are an often misunderstood form of transportation of liquids. As we mentioned, pipelines face heavy regulations to ensure the safety of the environment and all the communities around the structure. Many of these regulations vary based on what they transport and where they’re located.

When you invest in a professional pipeline or tank inspection, your engineers will ensure your pipeline complies with current regulations. It’s key to invest in a pipeline inspection conducted by structural engineers. They are qualified to address issues and identify vulnerabilities while being well-versed in regulation compliance projects. Fit-For-Service analysis of pipeline is important to comply with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and American Petroleum Institute’s standard practices.

A trustworthy contractor will provide you with an analysis of your pipeline in accordance with DOT and PHMSA requirements, in addition to an inspection of vulnerabilities and high-risk areas.

There are countless reasons to get a pipeline inspection. A pipeline inspection is essential to the functionality, safety, and longevity of your pipeline and tanks. At Dreiym Engineering, we offer a robust selection of pipeline safety inspections, including a pipeline cathodic protection survey.

Cathodic protection is the best way to prevent corrosion from affecting your pipeline or tank structures. It prevents corrosion by changing anodes into cathodes to prevent the formation of rust and multiple corrosion types. Protection from deterioration allows your business to run with peace of mind, and you can rest easy knowing you’re preventing leaks due to rust holes.

Contact us today for more information on our pipeline integrity services and consulting or to learn more about why you need to invest in inspections for your pipeline.