IPC 2006 was by far the best technical conference I have ever attended. My attitude has swung from the ill-informed belief that I could not justify the cost of a faraway overseas conference to enthusiastic for a return to Calgary in two years time for IPC 2008. IPC has been held in Calgary every two years since the mid 1990s and has grown impressively over that time. It now attracts some 1,400 delegates to hear approximately 340 papers in 12 parallel tracks. There is no way that one can attend every session of interest, and in fact I found it necessary to spend an hour or so each night working out my logistics for the next day to optimise the sessions attended.
All papers are peer reviewed, so there is no question of their quality as significant technical contributions. And in addition to the three and a half days of technical sessions there was a day and a half set aside for half or full-day tutorials on 18 diverse topics. My concern that the tutorials might have been rather elementary was quite wrong – those that I attended proved to be in-depth presentations of great value.
The 18 tutorials covered a similarly broad range of topics such as integrity evaluation, SCC, risk/reliability, corrosion, materials, in-line inspection, coatings, HDD, welding and repair.
Although the location necessarily imposed a slight North American bias, the conference is accurately described as international. Very strong representation from Europe and South America among speakers and delegates ensured that different perspectives and approaches were presented. Unfortunately, there were only about six Australian delegates and two Australian papers, which were from Steve Ohl and Bob Allison of Australian Pipeline Trust on in-line inspection of the Moomba-Sydney pipeline for SCC, and Leigh Fletcher on MIAB welding-Leigh was also co-chair of the Materials and Joining track. It is to be hoped that in 2008 there will be both more Australian papers and more Australian delegates.
I can only comment on those sessions that I attended, which were mainly the design and risk and reliability tracks with a smattering of others on GIS, integrity management, materials and standards, as well as tutorials on pipeline risk management and reliability-based limit state design.
It was an eye-opening experience to learn of the state of the art in all of these areas. I know of no other way to so rapidly improve awareness of the advances in pipeline engineering. While the quality of Australian pipeline engineering and research is excellent, our industry is so small relative to the rest of the world that our local seminars cannot hope to emulate the breadth and depth achieved by a major international conference such as IPC.
Despite my almost breathless enthusiasm for this particular conference I don’t want to give the impression that our Australian practices are seriously deficient. On the contrary, our AS 2885 risk assessment process stands as a valid and entirely appropriate approach for use in this country-and probably elsewhere-despite being uniquely different and making no use of the sophisticated quantitative methods that are available. Many of the new technologies, such as very high grade linepipe and new design methods, such as reliability based analysis are being driven by circumstances that are generally applicable here only in a small way if at all; we do not have very large diameter pipelines, arctic environments, or numerous old degraded pipelines with high failure rates. Nevertheless, awareness of the state of the art will put Australian pipeline engineers in the position where they can call on the most appropriate solution for those unusual circumstances that inevitably arise from time to time.
I commend the next IPC to any pipeline engineer who has the opportunity to attend.