Corrosion Inhibitors for Oil Pipelines: Use and Experimental Evaluation

The strategic importance, environmental integrity, and nature of oil pipeline flows are the opening topics. This is followed with discussing corrosion as a failure-causing phenomenon in oil pipelines, its mechanisms, and its interrelation with the physicochemical conditions of the flow, and the metallurgy of the steel. After that, the fundamentals of corrosion inhibition, and the inhibitors evaluation, selection, compatibility, testing, protocols, classification, and environmental assessment are explained in detail. Then the four main families of inhibitors of amides and imidazolines, nitrogen quaternaries, nitrogen heterocycles, and polyxylated aminesare discussed. In this discussion, the chemical composition, preparation, mechanisms of inhibition, use in oil pipelines, the physicochemical, hydrodynamic, and metallurgical effects, the experimental testing, and the environmental considerations for each of the four inhibitor families are discussed in detail.