The Study Tour to the JTM also included two weeks of site visits to gas and oil pipeline related facilities in Italy, England, Germany and France.

Following a detailed selection process at the end of 2008, the Australian Pipeline Industry Association (APIA) selected Lara Kayess (Oil Search), Craig Clarke (APA Group), Cameron Dinnis (Orrcon), Ben Cooper (A J Lucas) and David West (WorleyParsons) to represent the younger generation of pipeline engineers rising through the ranks.

Funding for the scholarships was generously provided by APIA, the Australian Gas Industry Trust (AGIT) and Orrcon. Through the scholarship funding, the five young employees of APIA Research and Standards Committee member companies were presented with a unique opportunity to gain an in-depth understanding of the European gas industry from both a technical and commercial point of view. The opportunity to meet professionals from the European and North American industries provided an understanding of the issues faced in these continents, as well as their cultural and business styles, and established an international network for the participants to utilise in coming years.

The trip commenced on 11 May in Milan, when the party gathered to attend the 17th Biennial Joint Technical Meeting (JTM). The JTM technical sessions, meal breaks and social activities offered the scholarship participants a fantastic opportunity to network (and debate) with colleagues from the international community within their own fields of work and from other fields in the pipeline and gas industry.

Following the completion of the JTM, the group, which also included APIA Business Manager Steve Dobbie as the designated ‘Tour Manager’, travelled to Rome. The participants took full advantage of the wonderful opportunity of a free weekend in the capital of Italy, and managed to visit the many historical highlights in Rome.

Italy and England

The series of European site visits commenced with a full day spent at the facilities of Centro Sviluppo Materiali (CSM). Operating from its headquarters near Rome (Castel Romano), CSM is a polycentric company with facilities in Dalmine, Terni, Naples, Pula (Sardinia), Mefli and Perdasdefogu, and is now a leading European research centre for materials innovations servicing the steel, oil and gas, energy, aerospace and manufacturing sectors worldwide.

Through a series of presentations by CSM staff and a walk around the facilities, the group learnt about CSM’s pipeline research in key areas including:

* Strain-based design; * Reliability-based integrity; * Excavator attack; * Environmentally assisted cracking; * High pressure, high temperature corrosion; * Full scale burst testing; and, * Welding.

Tuesday 19 May was a travel day as the party flew to London and then drove to Rochester, 50 km southeast of London. This was to be the base for the next day’s visit to the National Grid’s Isle of Grain LNG Terminal. National Grid is an international gas and electricity company servicing customers mainly in Great Britain, and the LNG terminal receives and handles 9.8 MMt/a of natural gas (12 per cent of the UK demand) from a variety of energy companies such as BP, Centrica and GDF Suez.

The LNG storage tanks are linked to the seaside receiving terminal by a 4.7 km pipeline. The group was escorted around the facility – the largest above ground LNG storage facility in the world – by Keith Dennis, a semi-retired National Grid representative who had spent almost his entire working life with National Grid and demonstrated his enormous passion for the facility. The climb to the top of a couple of the huge storage tanks was a particular highlight of the visit, and everyone appreciated the way that Mr Dennis patiently answered the many questions put to him.

From Rochester, the party drove across the southern part of England, via quick visits to Windsor Castle, Stonehenge and, thanks to Cameron’s knowledge, Woodhenge before arriving at Corfe Castle. This quaint historical village is located near Bournemouth and was only a few miles from the next site visit – BP’s Wytch Farm upstream oil and gas facility. The facility operates under very strict health, safety and environmental (HSE) guidelines as it is located on some of Britain’s rarest and most valuable wildlife habitat, heritage sites and prime real estate. Through presentations made by relevant BP staff, the group was shown how BP is currently completing a major pipeline repair project related to the integrity of the gathering flowlines. The flowlines are 20 years old and in-line inspection revealed hundreds of carbon dioxide corrosion defects.

The end of this visit also brought the participants to the end of the first week of the trip. Saturday 23 May was spent driving back to London where the team stayed overnight before heading to Düsseldorf located by the Rhine River – the steel making hub of Germany.

Germany

A series of site visits in Duisburg and Mülheim over the next two and half days exposed the young engineers to almost all aspects of European pipe making.

The first visit was to Salzgitter Mannesmann Forschung GmbH (SZMF), which is the primary research group servicing the Salzgitter AG group manufacturing operations. Salzgitter AG is the second largest manufacturer of steel in Germany. Secretary General of the EPRG and head of mechanical engineering at SZMF Dr Gerhard Knauf and his team of research leaders provided a number of detailed boardroom and onsite presentations that highlighted SZMF’s research capabilities aligned with steel and pipe making processes – steel production, continuous casting, hot-rolling, pipe fabrication, and application.

A visit to the Hüttenwerke Krupp Mannesmann (HKM) steel plant rounded off the first day in Germany. HKM currently produces 5.6 MMt/a of steel in both slab form and round form.

The slabs are used by HKM’s shareholders Thyssen Krupp and Salzgitter Mannesmann for the production of plate and coil and the rounds are used by Valourec and Mannesmann Tubes for the production of seamless pipe.

The next process in the production of steel pipe was unveiled to the group the following day when visiting the Salzgitter Mannesmann Grobblech (SMGB) plate rolling mill, which turns slabs from HKM into plates via hot-rolling. SMGB’s plate mill can produce up to 800,000 tonnes of steel plate per year and the party was fascinated to see the mill operating at full pace while being shown around by the Manager of the hot-rolling department, Dr Christine Beltrami.

A very personable and interesting young German, Raimund Bülte, was the group’s host at the next stop – the Salzgitter Mannesmann Grobblech (SMGB) pipe bending mill, which is an induction bending plant. During the visit, the pipe bending mill was fulfilling a contract to supply several bends to a French nuclear power plant. The pipes were approximately 1 m in diameter and had a wall thickness of approximately 100 mm. The bend sections were about 4 m long and required to be bent through 90°. This was of great interest to the scholarship holders.

After a sumptuous lunch provided by SMGB, Dr Hans-Georg Hillenbrand, the Sales Director for Europipe, welcomed the team to Europipe’s pipe mill. Europipe’s Mülheim facility has a U-O-E mill and a three-roll bending mill, and it produces up to X120 grade pipe. The U-O-E mill can produce pipes up to 18 m long while the three-roll bending mill can produce pipes up to 12 m long. The U-O-E process is so-called because of the main steps it uses to form plate into pipe:

* U – the plate is first bent into a ‘U’ shape * O – the plate is next bent into an ‘O’ shape * E – the pipe is mechanically ‘E’xpanded.

On the day of the tour, Europipe was producing 1,219 mm outer diameter API 5L X80 linepipe for the Nord Stream Pipeline Project. Nord Stream is an offshore pipeline that will run the length of the Baltic Sea to deliver gas directly from Russia to Germany.

The German part of the trip was completed the following day with a visit to the Mülheim pipe coating plant where the party was shown the whole coating process. Having followed the whole pipe making process in Germany, commencing from the production of the steel, this was an appropriate way to finish, where the visitors watched the final coated pipe being loaded onto rail trucks for shipment to another pipeline construction project in Europe.

The generosity of the German hosts is worthy of mention and thanks go to Dr Knauf, Mr Bülte and Mr Hillenbrand, who all hosted dinners on behalf of their respective companies for the touring party during their stay in Germany. This hospitality was greatly appreciated.

France

The afternoon of Wednesday 27 May was spent on a very fast train to Paris, where the team was met at Gare de Nord by Pascal Vercamer, a leading researcher with Gaz De France (GDF) Suez.

The next day and a half was spent at GDF Suez’s impressive research facilities located directly opposite the Stade de France in the northern suburbs of Paris.

GDF Suez is the result of the merger of Gaz De France and SUEZ, which occurred in July 2008. The aim of the merger was to create one of the top energy providers in the world. Gaz De France was previously a government-owned utility that privatised 10 years ago. SUEZ was an energy and environment (water and sewerage treatment) provider predominately in France and Belgium.

The particular facility that the young engineers visited is primarily dedicated to gas research and development, and has four main focus areas:

1. LNG 2. Gas utilisation and new services 3. Transmission and underground storage 4. Distribution.

The differences in the size of the Australian versus European research and development facilities are dramatic. The group discovered that GDF Suez’s gas research and development area has 560 engineers and technicians located over two sites in Paris, and had a budget of €90 million (approximately $A154 million) in 2008.

By lunch time on Friday 29 May, the site visits were completed and the visitors headed home to Australia.

All of the scholarship winners greatly appreciated the opportunity provided to them by APIA, AGIT and Orrcon and were excellent ambassadors for their employers and the Australian pipeline industry at large.

APIA would also like to acknowledge and thank Dr Knauf of EPRG and SZMF for his immense contribution to the overall organisation of the site visits undertaken during the trip. His efforts certainly paid off, as this was a trip that will live forever in the minds of the five scholarship winners.