The American Petroleum Institute (API) held its 5th Biennial Inspection Summit from January 7-10, 2013, in Galveston, TX. The Inspection Summit is sponsored every two years by API and included a midstream/downstream section in the agenda for the first time at the 2013 event. The summit was attended by over 1,000 individuals from the world’s largest and leading petroleum pipeline operating companies and technology developers and inspection service providers.
At the 2013 API Inspection Summit, PRCI staff and member company representatives participated in two separate panel sessions that addressed inspection challenges for the pipeline industry, with one session focused on ILI technology challenges and the other addressing difficult to inspect (commonly referred to as “unpiggable”) pipelines. The panel sessions were an open forum for the attendees at the Summit to ask questions of the panelists and generate discussion on a wide range of issues and concerns that relate to pipeline inspection. Other panelists included representatives from pipeline operating companies and pipeline inspection technology developers and service providers. Mark Piazza (ILI Inspection panel participant and moderator for the Difficult to Inspect panel) and Rick McNealy (Difficult to Inspect panel) represented PRCI during the panel sessions and provided perspective on the industry R&D being pursued through PRCI’s Operations & Integrity Technical Committee that is focused on addressing each of these key target areas. Other PRCI member companies on the panels included Chevron (John O’Brien and Luc Huyse) and Rosen Inspection (Bryce Brown). The panels also emphasized the close work and coordination with API through our liquids pipeline member companies, API’s R&D Work Group, and AOPL/API directly as a Pipeline Industry Association member in PRCI.
The Inspection Summit also included three days of technical tracks and presentations on a wide range of topics for the upstream and midstream/downstream sectors of the petroleum industry that relate to inspection. Presentations made at the summit included two that are based on PRCI projects. There were presentations on the PRCI NDE Repository (PRCI Project reference NDE-2-2) as a means to support inspection technology qualification and development and on PRCI’s development of an Integrated Cleaning and Inspection Tool (PRCI Project reference NDE-1-3).