WE Colloquium: Doug Fairchild, Newly Developed High-Manganese Steel Pipe and Methods of Welding

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Abstract

Canada has the third largest oil reserves in the world with an amount that rivals Saudi Arabia.  96% of Canada’s oil lies in the oil sands which is mixture of sand, rock, water and a heavy oil product called bitumen.  A primary method of extraction is by mining.  The process includes scooping the earth by large shovels, truck transport, crushing, mixing with water, pipeline transport, and eventual separation of the oil from the mix.  Because this process involves transport, handling, and reduction of an erosive mix, much of the mining and processing equipment requires ferequent replacement. The slurry pipelines are particularly expensive to maintain.

ExxonMobil, Korean Steel maker POSCO, and ExxonMobil affiliate Imperial Oil have collaborated in developing a new high-manganese steel (HMS) for the slurry pipeline application.  The efforts began with small laboratory samples that were subjected to extensive scientific study, and finished with commercial pipes and field welding technology.  The new HMS slurry pipe performs significantly better than the commonly used X70 pipe.  A 1 km section of this new HMS pipeline was recently installed at Imperial Oil’s Kearl operations.  This presentation will describe the mining operations and also provide a description of the HMS metallurgical design, weld consumable development, pipeline welding, and full-scale field trials.

Bio

After obtaining his MS in Welding Eng. at OSU, Doug joined ExxonMobil in 1982, worked for 7 years, took a leave to obtain his PhD at OSU, and then returned to ExxonMobil.  He has worked primarily in R&D focusing on the areas of welding engineering, physical metallurgy, fracture mechanics, and failure analysis.  Doug has conducted extensive work in the area of high strength steels.  His work has applications to the design and fabrication of structures used for the exploration and production of oil and gas.  These structures include pipelines, offshore structures, ships, pressure vessels, and liquefied natural gas facilities.  His work on, and the naming of, local brittle zones provided the basis for the industry standard API RP2Z.  Doug’s work also includes the welding technology that was used to construct the world’s strongest pipeline, X120, in 2004.  Doug has produced about 75 publications and 12 patents.