1.1 Overview

The first pipeline was built in the United States in 1859 to transport crude oil (Wolbert, 1952). Through the one-and-a-half century of pipeline operating practice, the petroleum industry has proven that pipelines are by far the most economical means of large scale overland transportation for crude oil, natural gas, and their products, clearly superior to rail and truck transportation over competing routes, given large quantities to be moved on a regular basis. Transporting petroleum fluids with pipelines is a continuous and reliable operation. Pipelines have demonstrated an ability to adapt to a wide variety of environments including remote areas and hostile environments. Because of their superior flexibility to the alternatives, with very minor exceptions, largely due to local peculiarities, most refineries are served by one or more pipelines.

Man s inexorable demand for petroleum products intensified the search for oil in the offshore regions of the world as early as 1897, when the offshore oil exploration and production started from the Summerland, California (Leffler et al., 2003). The first offshore pipeline was born in the Summerland, an idyllic-sounding spot just southeast of Santa Barbara. Since then the offshore pipeline has become the unique means of efficiently transporting offshore fluids, i.e., oil, gas, and water.

Offshore pipelines can be classified as follows (Figure 1.1):

• Flowlines transporting oil and/or gas from satellite subsea wells to subsea manifolds;

• Flowlines transporting oil and/or gas from subsea manifolds to production facility platforms;

• Infield flowlines transporting oil and/or gas between production...