Corrosion of Steel Pipelines Transporting Hydrocarbon Condensed Products, Obtained from a High Pressure Separator System: A Failure Analysis Study

Abstract

In this paper, the corrosion of steel pipelines transporting hydrocarbon condensed products was studied. Different activities of sampling and analysis were carried out to diagnose the failure causes and to establish a control system for the corrosion problem. The combination of three types of corrosion, including erosion corrosion, galvanic corrosion and microbiologically induced corrosion, was synthetically considered. A serial of experiments were designed to research those types of corrosion. This type of failure was observed in characteristics sites of the pipeline, mainly in direction changes and welding joints. Additionally, localized corrosion was observed in the inner steel wall and distributed along the pipeline, although a tendency was not detected.