Waiting for disaster to strike

That sounds terrible, doesn't it? After all, we are in the business of preventing disaster. We use proven technologies to ward off catastrophic failures of metallic structures.

On the outside, we're the good guys who get to wear white hats. Yet, it is up to us to react with immediacy to spectacular failures that validate our existence as corrosion engineers.

Without them, nobody would be interested in corrosion prevention. The press would never show any interest in our work. And local state and the federal government would have no incentive to create regulations requiring corrosion control.

It would be great to prevent corrosion without the disaster. But that is not how we react as humans.

A great case in point is the power industry, a critical sector for the health of any country. The United States just finished a boom period that saw thousands of gas-fired power plants built over the past 20 years. Each one supplied their natural gas feed stocks from buried transmission pipelines, heavily regulated by the Department of Transportation and other local agencies.

And why are they heavily regulated? You guessed it -- disasters. Really nasty ones where gas pipelines explode, kill school children, and catch the attention of communities and politicians.

Every gas-fired power plant has a metering station, similar to a home's. At a power plant, the metering station is the boundary for ownership of the natural gas product and for responsibility for corrosion control.

Yet it's also the boundary for the regulations. Power plants are not bound to the same regulations that apply to gas pipeline companies. That means metering points outside the power plant undergo frequent corrosion testing and inspecting, while metering points within do not -- hence the existence of gas-fired plants with buried gas pipelines feeding their turbines.

Worse, power-plant personnel are blissfully unaware of the life-threatening risks below them. The corrosion control system that power plant designers often put in are contractor-grade, vanilla CP systems. These systems may work, but require frequent testing, and are easily knocked off line.

Designers often don’t care if the systems are not reliable because they only have a one-year plant warranty. After that, it is up to the operator to keep them online. And since operators are only concerned with producing energy, they don’t understand what CP system they have, what they need to make it work, or how to test it.

There are some exceptions -- plants that have well-designed, robust CP systems maintained and tested by qualified NACE CP Certified technicians. But they are few and far between.

If we have a catastrophic gas explosion at a power plant -- and in my opinion, that will happen soon -- perhaps the disaster would open the Power industry’s eyes. Because right now, their eyes are wide shut.