News

Last Monday PIMS Inter­national has returned from their visit to SASOL Gas in Johannesburg. For our project PIMS In Space (in cooperation with ESA) PIMS International had visited SASOL Gas South Africa and Mozambique to define their require­ments for this project.

The PIMS in Space workshop took place on January 18, 2011 with a feedback session on January 20, 2011. PIMS International and ESA gave a number of presentations:

• About the scope of the workshop.
• About the European Space Agency.
• About current operational scenario's, problems and needs.
• Examples of solutions that we can offer by integration of space assets and terrestrial solutions. Results of previous studies and progress since.

At the end of the day there was a discussion, in order to refine needs and added value, study focus. The main idea underlying the workshop program was:

• To discuss current needs for pipeline integrity management and to briefly discuss what space assets could contribute to the subject of pipeline integrity.
• People from SASOL were stimulated to present and discuss their scenarios.
• From the scenarios, the user needs and user requirements were identified and discussed with SASOL.

During the Wednesday (January 19, 2011), the team also presented an NTA-8000 workshop. During this workshop, pipeline integrity management is discussed from a Dutch point of view (as encoded in the directive NTA-8000). The report of the NTA-8000 workshop of SASOL Gas can be downloaded here. Note: the numbers in this document are fictitious.

PIMS International would like to thank SASOL Gas, and in particular Neo Modise, for their hospitality during the week and their valuable contribution to the workshop.