Managing Corrosion Challenges in Gas Processing Plants

摘要

Process industries such as oil, gas and petrochemical plants have critical process equipment. This equipment can experience deterioration to varying extent due to complex operating conditions. In the meantime, optimization of turnarounds preferably by extending the interval with shorter shutdown duration to perform remedial actions is also required to enable plant's readiness to meet the projected demand. Uthmaniyah Gas Plant (UGP) in Southern Area Gas Operations of Saudi Aramco is one of the largest gas processing plants in the world. More than two decades of our operational experience demonstrated that the metallurgy selected at the initial design performed satisfactorily. However, aggressive deterioration was also experienced in critical systems due to several factors such as mode of operation, change of composition, contaminants and aging, etc. As a result of the accelerated corrosion, the affected component can often be the source of major incident risk and therefore, timely integrity management is critical to ensure Plant's safety and reliability. While these corrosion concerns can be efficiently addressed in new plants with appropriate design and material selection, cost effective control of accelerated corrosion in existing plants remains a challenging task. A comprehensive corrosion control manual, timely implementation and adapting to Management of Change (MOC) culture are the core elements of an ideal toolbox to address the integrity issues. This paper outlines specific integrity issues in a gas processing plant's point of view, limitations with the conventional techniques and the innovative approaches adopted for integrity management including the successful deployment of advanced nondestructive examination (NDE) corrosion mapping technology.