ABS to Develop Design Criteria for Subsea Pipelines

Hyundai Heavy Industries has awarded ABS a contract to develop subsea pipeline design and training guidelines in support of FEED.

ABS announced the award of a contract from South Korean shipyard Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) to develop a set of subsea pipeline design criteria and associated training materials. The criteria will include guidelines for global buckling and stability analyses supplemental to the ABS Guide for Building and Classing Subsea Pipeline Systems and applicable industry and site condition standards.

As a significant number of deepwater and ultra deepwater subsea fields come online within the next decade, offshore pipeline infrastructure will need to be expanded safely to transport additional production volumes to shore. One potential hazard to designing subsea pipelines is buckling, which can compromise structural integrity due to loss of in-place stability and potential development of excessive bending. ABS will analyze this and other potential subsea pipeline design issues to support the safe and reliable development of transportation infrastructure as well as subsea processing systems.

"As operations move farther offshore into deeper water and high pressure/high temperature environments, subsea pipelines must be designed in accordance with the full range of industry design standards as those standards are one of the components used to verify their safe operation," says Dr. Hoseong Lee, ABS Vice President of Global Korea Business Development and the Korea Energy Technology Center (KETC). "The goal of developing these subsea pipeline design criteria is to consider the different issues that can arise during the early stages of the design cycle using ABS classification standards as a baseline for safety."

As part of the work scope, ABS will provide training for applying the design criteria during the front-end engineering design (FEED) phase and FEED document review services to HHI employees at the recently established ABS Energy Corridor office in Houston, Texas.

"As HHI continues to expand its business in the growing subsea sector, research and development initiatives aimed at the safe design and engineering of subsea equipment and technologies is crucial," says Dr. J.S. Park, Executive Vice President and Head of Corporate Technology Institute at Hyundai Heavy Industries. "We are delighted to work with ABS to increase our technical capabilities and knowledge in the area of subsea pipeline design."

ABS has been the preferred classification society for the offshore and energy industry for more than 50 years and has kept pace with increasing investments in subsea research, from subsea manifolds and templates, to communications technology and processing equipment. The ABS Subsea, Umbilicals, Risers and Flowlines (SURF) team is working with both industry and academic partners on subsea technology, electrification and communication research initiatives in ABS' Technology headquarters in Houston and five global technology centers, including KETC.