Pipelines Editing and Proofreading Services

An inspection tool runs the length of the line and comes back with eleven thousand indications. Most are nothing. A few hundred are worth looking at, a handful matter, and one of them — if the assessment is wrong — is the reason the pipeline is on the news in two years. Everything between the raw data and the excavation crew is a document, and the quality of those documents is what integrity management actually consists of.

We edit what pipeline operators and integrity specialists produce — in-line inspection reporting and anomaly assessment documentation, integrity management plans and threat assessments, dig criteria and response timeframes, direct assessment and excavation reporting, repair method selection and documentation, pressure test and reassessment records, corrosion management and cathodic protection documentation, right of way and landowner communications, third-party damage prevention material, emergency response and control room procedures, and regulatory submissions and compliance reporting. Our editors work on the criteria that decide which anomalies get dug up.

The anomaly response criteria are the document that converts data into action, and their failure is criteria written as guidance. An assessment concluding that an anomaly should be investigated in due course has produced a queue with no order and no deadline. We work through these so every response category is defined by a calculated quantity with a threshold — predicted failure pressure against maximum operating pressure, depth as a percentage of wall, growth rate between inspections — and a response timeframe in days, since a criterion without a clock is a criterion that yields to the excavation budget; so the assessment method is named with its inputs and its known conservatism, because a method that overcalls corrosion by twenty per cent produces a different dig list from one that undercalls; so tool tolerance is applied explicitly and stated, given that an indication at 48% depth from a tool with ±10% is a potential 58% feature and the arithmetic should appear rather than being understood; so the interacting-defect rules are written out, as adjacent features assessed individually are the classic route to an underestimate; so any deferral is recorded with who approved it, on what basis, and the date by which it must be revisited; and so the criteria for immediate pressure reduction are unambiguous and require no authorisation to apply. Programmes documented this way dig up the right features.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including inspection data, assessments and regulatory correspondence. We are editors rather than integrity, corrosion or regulatory specialists, and we offer no view on anomaly assessment, thresholds or fitness for service. What we can do is make the criteria produce a decision rather than a discussion.