Buried Valve Brought Above Ground

Client requested

The client had an abandoned buried tee on a 12” pipeline which needed to be removed.  In the vicinity, there was also a buried valve that was difficult to perform regular valve inspections. 

Understanding the best solution

A single IsoTool was employed to remove the abandoned lateral and replace it with a new above ground valve. 

Planning and delivery

The mountainous terrain required the IsoTool to hold back 400’ of hydrostatic head, or 150psi. 

Once the new valve was tied in, the IsoTool was unset and pushed to the downstream side of the valve and purged to trap.  This purged section contained the buried valve, which was then cut out and replaced with straight pipe.

There was some severe corrosion at the bottom of the pipeline, which was called out in an MFL log.  Integral performs stress calculation of every project to ensure that the force of setting the tool is well under the SMYS of the pipe. 

For this job the wall thickness used for calculation was reduced by 30%, the maximum corrosion found by the ILI.  By using these degraded numbers Integral was able to ensure the integrity of the set location and remove all concerns of exceeding yield.

Service completion report

The IsoTool was set for 8 hours.  Both the buried valve and the buried tee were removed within the scope of the planned outage. 

The client was pleased with the time and cost savings realized by The IsoTool.