VitalAccurateThinking

Bacteria or Acidity?

This morning on my way to work, I was listening to my favorite local Business Radio station, AM1320. There was an oil industry analyst on the program. I believe he was Sean Brodrich who is the editor of Red-Hot Canadian Small-Caps. At one point in the program, the topic turned to the BP pipeline corrosion and there was a reference to bacteria eating through the pipeline. At that point, I was just flabbergasted if the host, Brent Clanton and the analyst were serious. It is obvious that the BP pipeline corrosion is caused by the acidic nature of C02 and other sulfur compounds found in crude oil. In fact, Clanton had the Business Radio oil analyst Richard Riley on the previous day to explain it to the audience. Here is the mp3.

Hopefully, they were kidding about bacteria being the cause of the corrosion. If not, then shame on him.

Once the show is posted, I will listen again to make sure I heard it right. Stay tuned as they say.

Updated and Bumped.

Here is a link to the show. About 3:55 through the segment is the comment about bacteria and corrosion. I hope they are kidding.

Update Number 2. It looks like I was wrong. There is a biological component to the corrosion:

Microbiological corrosion

All indications are that the corrosion that caused the hole in the transit line was biological in origin, caused by sulfate reducing bacteria inside the pipeline, Johnson said.

"The evidence has mounted that that is true,” she said.“We’ve scanned what the (corrosion) pits look like in the bottom of the pipe.”

Also the way in which the corrosion in the pipeline accelerated over time is characteristic of the way in which microbiological corrosion develops, as the bacteria grow and multiply.

The bacteria form in water, so that problems associated with microbiological corrosion tend to be associated with water carrying pipelines, such as the lines that are used for waterflood operations.

In fact, BP treats its water injection lines at Prudhoe Bay with anticorrosion chemicals and runs maintenance pigs down the lines at frequencies ranging from weekly to monthly (a maintenance pig is a device that passes through the inside of a pipeline, scraping and cleaning the inside walls of the pipeline). The company pigged its Prudhoe Bay pipelines more than 350 times in 2005, Johnson said.

posted by Jim VAT @ 6:37 PM