Tankers play a crucial role in transporting gas and liquids around the world. They are essential for moving large quantities of products, helping to meet the world's energy demands. Tanker operations are further supported by pipelines which facilitate downstream storage operations.

While pipelines are the safest mode of transporting any fluid, they’re not without their challenges and any tanker pipeline leak event has the potential to cause significant environmental, financial and reputational damage.

As monobuoy offshore pipelines are typically used to connect to ships, this paper reviews the challenges that can impact tanker pipelines and the feasibility of different leak detection system configurations.

In the context of leak detection for tanker operations, it’s challenging to get power and communication onto the buoy and there is limited space for instrumentation. These limitations will be discussed along with corrosion from the repeated transportation of hydrocarbons and chemicals, passing ships blocking data communications, short and typically flexible pipelines and anchor strikes. All of these will impact the successful installation of a leak detection system.

Tanker loading and unloading pipelines operate under a range of configurations, including longer pipelines with offshore instrumentation and shorter pipelines where offshore access is limited. This paper discusses how different leak detection approaches may be applied depending on pipeline configuration, with particular focus on single ended leak detection as a viable option where offshore instrumentation is constrained.