Article 2, Parameters to be Defined

 This Article 2, is a follow up to my "Article 1, Defining "Bolt Failure". The reason I think this is significant is because as I stated in Article 1, we have not taken this problem seriously, if we have not yet defined it.

This past summer, Brian Salerno, the Director of the "Bureau for Safety, Environment and Enforcement", BSEE, issued a mandate that Bolt Failures shall be reported. The contents of that statement are below in a link to the actual page.

"Director’s Corner"

The API SC 20E Committee has made it easier for us to define what a "Bolt Failure" is by explaining in great detail what a bolt should and should not be.

This API 20E Standard, has been available since 2012, but it has never been called out on a project. API, even breaks down the quality needed into three categories to help justify their use:

BSL-1, Only reinstates the standards which should be inspected already, but are not. Things like dimensional parameters, quality in large quantities, applications, specialty forms, foreign MTRs and other variables are cross referenced directly with their standards. BSL-1, rules are no different than what we should be doing now on every Purchase Order.

BSL-2, Is asking for something out of the ordinary, something with a tighter grain structure, something not necessarily asked for in the past. Something engineered to prevent and take into consideration hydrogen embrittlement in bolting that pertains to a Splash and/ or Subsea environment.

BSL-3, Keeps the standards of BSL-2 and goes even further in disallowing continues pour in milling, due to a possibility of creating white band (bands of hardness) in the length of the bolt, allowing for hydrogen embrittlement. Bolting at this level would mainly be designated to drilling equipment and critical operations.

What has changed

How did it get to this point and what is going to make a change? It starts with a definition change, and today that word is: catastrophe. In the past, this word meant, "when more than 10,000 lives were lost." Now days a catastrophe is, “ an event causing great and often sudden damage or suffering; a disaster, a national, economic, environmental, cultural, federal, industrial, nuclear, catastrophe"

Another oil spill anywhere is now classified as a catastrophe. To BSEE it is an environmental catastrophe and an unaccounted risk to safety. To the oil producers it is again an unaccounted risk to safety, environmental, industrial and a possible economic catastrophe.

It was not the Bureau of the Interior that changed the meaning of catastrophe; it was a cultural change. But, it will be the government that enforces the definition of a "Bolt Failure" in order to prevent another catastrophe.

Pressure

Hydrogen embrittlement is not the only variable we are accounting for and where material specifications are being called into tighter restrictions. API 20 E is titled, “Alloy and Carbon Steel Bolting for Use in the Petroleum and Natural Gas Industries”. This would include pressure and temperature applications as well.

I want to focus on pressure, because it has the biggest undecided factor attached to it. At what pressure level should you use API 20E? For example, at what pressure would you see a catastrophe occur if something went wrong?

Are we not currently using safe guards in checking MTRs without API 20E? Yes, of course we are, but with API 20E you are making sure that everyone involved with the manufacturing of the bolt knows their role and has followed it to a "T". At what level of safety and environment are we going to use API 20E in flange integrity?

Calling into account the possibility of "if" occurring. "IF" there was a kick-out of high pressure on this pipe or valve what would that pressure release do? Are personnel around that system if it fails? What is the system containing that could cause safety and or environmental damages to the air, or ground water?

The answers currently range wildly up and down as to where tighter bolting restrictions and level of attention need to be directed. It is another undefined variable that has yet to be addressed. The idea of making 150 psi flange configure to API 20E, seems a little more than ridiculous.

Unless that is a four bolt septic assist flange over the prepared food kitchen at your local epicurean grocery store, then by all that is good and holy, please use BSL-3 bolts, please. Many have decided to take it at a case by case bases and pressures like 1,500 psi have been batted around as being the level where designation on bolting for flange integrity would be called into specification.

Making a 1,500 psi flange connection call out for API 20 E BSL-2 and 2,500 psi and above being an API 20E BSL-3 designation. Never the less others have already broken down the environmental reasons and safety reason like my comical example and have said that there will be API 20E and F clarification in high pressure in the coming years, right now we do not have that clarified exactly. Which leaves even more definitions undefined as right and wrong.

Standard references will I think have to clarify a pressure at which they are better off with the rules of API 20E and 20F. What those are will need to be determined by the industry, but with pipeline safety in the news every week and a course of action from the government almost eminent, I fear things could get stringent sooner rather than later.