Four major successes for Queens Award-winning firm
The latest in a series on our third Queen’s Award win and how the OMS approach to innovation affects our clients and our business.
OMS has recently won our third Queen’s Award for Enterprise in the innovation category. We won the award for our weld inspection system, which has evolved into the mainstay of our business over the last decade. Along the way we have encountered several setbacks, overcome many problems and learned much while developing the new system. We have also had many successes – below are the details of some projects that made a big impact on the evolution of our award-winning weld inspection technology.
Hasbah-2
On the Hasbah-2 project OMS inspected 20,000 welds and certified that the weld area was suitable for coating. Our system operates rapidly, ensuring that the inspection stage caused minimal delays. If coating or weld defects had been discovered later in the process it would have caused significant delays as welds were cut out and re-welded. A typical delay – between four to eight hours – on a pipe-lay vessel costing $500,000 per day can quickly send costs spiraling.
The weld acceptance rate on this particular project, one of the world’s longest CRA pipelines, was an exceptionally good 99.2%
Aasta Hansteen
OMS was contracted to inspect welds on the Aasta Hansteen project. We deployed a weld inspection crawler to South Korea to inspect the welds for the “pull tubes”. We located significant issues that required remediation before the spar was installed. Had the installation gone ahead without inspection those issues would have been discovered when the pull tubes went into use and the resulting problems would have cost millions of dollars.
Slug catcher
A “slug catcher” is a device used to separate oil, gas and water from each other as a pipeline comes ashore. It acts as a buffer to the onshore plant and is vital to the oil refinery’s successful operation. As it operates under high pressure, safety is critically important. A client in the Middle East feared there were areas of corrosion that could not be quantified from the outside of the pipe with ultrasonic techniques. We built a robot that could reduce its size to get through a narrow opening and, once inside, could expand to carry out its task. It was able to travel up to 200m along the slug catcher’s “fingers” and provided a comprehensive assessment of the extent of internal corrosion, which allowed our client to certify the pressure at which it could be used safely in the future and decide whether any remedial plan should be implemented.
Exxon Mobil
OMS are currently deploying our weld inspection equipment on a high profile project in the Middle East. A senior manager from Exxon Mobil has the following opinion of our service:
“I’ve found that using the OMS system allows quick and reliable evaluation of critical service welds. The combination of state of the art hardware and analysis software allows us to make engineering-based decisions regarding weld acceptability. I’ve found the OMS systems superior to others available on the market and the OMS team responsive to requests for changes when required.”
If you would like to learn more about our weld inspection system we would love to hear from you. Contact us here.
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Posted 19.05.2020
[5 minute read]
By Tim Clarke