The In-Line Inspection Project Team, under the Pipelines and Terminals Committee of ARPEL, recently launched the "Guidelines on In-Line Inspection Process Management," which was developed by professionals from Ecopetrol, Cenit, Coga Enap EP-Petroecuador Oldelval Petrobras Petroperú Pluspetrol, YPF and YPFB.

As stated in the document, as part of the pipeline integrity management, it is necessary to assess the integrity with different inspection techniques.

In-Line Inspection (ILI) is one of the most effective, direct and most in demand techniques at present to determine the actual status of a pipeline in all its extension.

In-line inspection allows locating and identifying "anomalies" present in the pipeline, quantifying their severity and providing a total evaluation of its integrity. As stated by the authors, it is an intrusive inspection consisting in sending an instrumented tool through the interior of the pipeline according to a proposed method with precision, quality and assured repeatability.

The purpose of this document is to establish general guidelines to manage the in-line inspection process at each stage, indicating the minimum requirements for the implementation of specialized technical inspection and diagnosis service of pipelines by using in-line inspection instrumented tools through the different technologies available in the market.

Through this document, the Project Team proposes to consolidate knowledge and best practices of pipelines and terminals operating companies in the region in a single reference guide in order to help companies achieve operational excellence through the support to strategic decision-making related to ILI processes.

The "Guidelines on In-Line Inspection Process Management” is accompanied by an Excel file with checklists, which are described in the document. The file allows the user to make a printout for his/her fieldwork as well as to include comments and to distribute it among professionals in the company.

The technical coordination of the document by ARPEL was conducted by Irene Alfaro, Downstream Director, and Tiphaine Le Moënner, Project Manager.

Link to download the document (for ARPEL members only): https://arpel.org/library/publication/515/