TECMA and Baker Hughes have been actively involved in supporting ENI in the development of the “Carbon Capture & Sequestration (CCS) pilot project”.

In order to re-use the existing offshore pipeline infrastructure for CO2 transportation in a CCS Demo project in Ravenna (Italy), ENI evaluated to insert a new 4” pipeline into an existing 20” pipeline to act as a conductor.

Using the latest ILI technology, TECMA was able to provide data that helped ENI to re-evaluate the integrity of the existing 20" pipeline and to re-use it as the main CO2 carrier.

TECMA implemented the operation with his “field-proven-progressive-safe calibration & enhanced cleaning process” and with the aim to get a comprehensive picture of the 20” pipeline condition, TECMA proposed to run an ILI vehicle that adds to the required scope a high-resolution metal loss inspection.

Leveraging on the advantage of having collected high resolution metal loss data during the inspection run, it has been possible to verify the absence of any metal loss feature that could affect the safe operation of the pipeline in CO2 transportation in gas phase and consequently allow performing a complete integrity assessment to substantiate the Management decision to re-use the former 20" gas production pipeline as the main CO2 carrier.

Thus, avoiding the very expensive and time-consuming pull-in-pipe of a dedicated 4” process pipeline and greatly contributing to reduce the environmental impact of the numerous phases associated to construction and pre-commissioning, such as water consumption, chemical treatment and exhausts emissions from the compressor spread.

Given the satisfactory result of this inspection, the same activity was performed also on the intrafield 14” pipeline. Both sealines were then chemically cleaned and super dryed ready for CO2 service.