to meet these by being flexible and adapting to the customers’ ways of working. Having supplied to oil and gas customers for more than 20 years, Outokumpu have developed strong project management to ensure clear communication from the customer to the technicians on the shop floor. In addition, the company invests in state-of-the-art equipment and qualification of production sites to meet the stringent standards of the industry.
Rolling steel to fine tolerances For all steel projects, the maximum length of a coil or strip will depend on the required thickness. The company’s melt shop in Avesta, Sweden, produces slabs of stainless steel, which are then passed through a hot rolling mill to produce hot-rolled coil several millimeters thick. Fine dimensional tolerances are achieved for the oil and gas industry at Outokumpu’s cold rolling mills in Sweden, Germany and Finland. Machinery at these facilities will roll the coils to precise thicknesses and split it into strip form, if needed.
Choosing a suitable alloy When it comes to alloy selection, operators are keen to avoid over-engineering their lines. In the past, they could afford the cost of adhering to standard specifications with the very highest levels of performance. Today’s oil and gas engineers are looking at a wider range of alloys to achieve the right level of corrosion
Figure 7. Strip coil is used to produce flexible pipe and longitudinally welded tube for umbilicals.
resistance at the right cost. Alternative alloys can deliver the same performance and might have a lower carbon footprint so it’s worth choosing alloys on a project-byproject basis. For MLP, clad pipe and flexible pipe in shallow seas, high strength is not important. For less corrosive environments and onshore projects, CRAs might be competing with painted carbon steel. In these cases, fabricators and manufacturers can specify an austenitic stainless steel such as 316L. This provides the
