Prospect and Latest Development of Pipeline Integrity Management in China

China’s pipeline industry has established a relatively complete technical system of pipeline integrity to solve the major security problems of detections and diagnosis of oil and gas pipeline, which effectively protect the intrinsic safety of pipeline. However, in recent two years, with the development of new materials, big data, cloud computing and other technology, the pipeline whose steel grade is above X80 has been developed successfully, and hydrogen-containing gas pipeline has been put into use. However, there are new technical problems in pipeline industry to be solved, and therefore it is necessary: (1) to gradually establish a big data management architecture model suitable for the pipeline system to study the fusion processing of big data, efficient algorithm and modeling technology, and provide big data decision support for pipeline energy control, disaster management and risk control, (2) to study the failure behavior of hydrogen-induced cracking of pipeline whose steel grade is above X80, find out its failure mechanism, analyze the difference of failure behavior between pipeline whose steel grade is above X80 and pipeline whose steel grade is lower, and finally form a set of integrity evaluation method of pipeline whose steel grade is above X80 in hydrogen-containing environment, (3) to study the reflection of the signal law of electromagnetic control array and piezoelectric ultrasound when they detect cracks and defects, in order to develop defect reflection signal data processing system, and finally develop the crack detection equipment of pipeline whose steel grade is above X80. In this paper the prospect and latest development of pipeline integrity management in China is reviewed.