Monitoring and Control of Oil and Gas Pipelines using Smart Cathodic Protection Method

Intelligent cathodic protection (CP) proposes a new architecture for network-controlled CP system. It is based on monitoring the polarization of the pipe at a suitable measuring point by means of a controller and a transmitter in order to send control information to the CP receiver, which must be located near the power source and should be able to adjust the input current according to the received data in order to optimize the energy consumption thanks to the CP. This approach is applicable to both transmission and distribution gas networks, which have the same measurement problems, but in the latter cases, due to the complexity of the network, it is more difficult to predict how the potential changes in individual branches of the network. The key objective of the proposed system is real-time pipeline protection, logging of data from terminal tap points (TLP) distributed over the pipeline and transformer rectifier unit (TRU) at base stations, server-based interrupt and control algorithm, remote diagnostics and analysis, alerts and action notifications real-time corrections.