The oil and gas supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) market is expected to grow over the next five years because of increased demand for the remote management of pipelines and growing pipeline networks. The question is: What approach should your operation take when setting up your SCADA system?

Flexible pipes were initially applied offshore as “kill and choke” lines, but today are found in every major production basin worldwide and used in a variety of applications to keep production flowing efficiently.

Before what was once a quiet middle-class suburban neighborhood in San Bruno, Calif. had cooled into silence, a decade-long response in the U.S. pipeline industry was already underway, focusing on the molecules making up modern large-diameter pipe and the densely populated areas in which these energy highways traverse.

The industry expects that all operators take a robust approach to integrity management, resulting in safe and reliable pipelines. One of the many known threats to pipeline integrity that must be explicitly addressed is Selective Seam Weld Corrosion (SSWC). This article explores ways of reliably assessing pipelines for the threat of SSWC and actively managing SSWC when it is an active threat.