Difference between piping and pipelibe engineers 2

Proficiency with the relevant standards i.e. ASME B31.3 - Process piping / ASME B31.4 - Pipeline Transportation Systems for Liquid Hydrocarbons and Other Liquids / ASME B31.8 - Gas Transmission and Distribution Piping Systems.

I design piping systems, but would not assume I can design piplines because I don't have the neccessary experience with the relevant standards.

You will have to read the pipeline codes, but IMO they really don't have too much to do with the everyday duties of a pipeline engineer.

Whereas a piping engineer is very much focused on materials, component specifications, routing through piperacks and over, under, around and through equipment in refineries, offshore platforms, food plants and chemical plants, pipeline engineering duties IMO include a very much wider scope of activities that may find you implementing a geographic information database system one day for a 20,000 mile pipeline transmission and distribution system and studying metallurgy of automatically welding 100 ksi steel the next. Much of the time between these extremes is spent in route permit acquisition, valve and pump station location, highway & railroad crossing design, construction specifications, assisting with land aquisition and maybe even transient flow hydraulics to name only a very few. Obviously, due to the heavy volume of construction in widely differing environments covering long distances through desert, mountains and corn fields right into NYC sometimes, a very good knowledge of civil engineering is extremely beneficial. I also find it takes a more extroverted personality to deal with a much greater number of people representing the many different groups and interests you find crossing 1000 miles of pipeline route than you do in a typical relatively restricted plant environment.


"What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, its what we know for sure" - Mark Twain

Thank you. Now it's more understandable for me.

If you'd like more detail, you can find my e-mail on my webspace-contacts section.


"What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, its what we know for sure" - Mark Twain

BigInch,
That was a very good description, and it all boilded down to "Piping engineers deal with issues inside a constricted space, Pipeline engineers deal with issues out in the open". Many of the skills that I see piping engineers struggle with are simply non issues in a pipeline (e.g., it is rare to see a pipeline engineer do a pipe-stress analysis on his entire pipeline). And vice versa (e.g., piping engineers don't have to deal with surface use contracts or land owner issues).

David

Except for a few real and the whole lot of virtual anchors, which (most of the time) all cancel out each other, stress wise its basically 1000 miles X 5280 of one foot after the other. Some lines permit telescoping which adds a few more "ft". And if you're clever you can get the speciality contractor's engineers to do the stress calcs for the horizontal drilling, spanning, offshore lay stresses, etc.


"What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, its what we know for sure" - Mark Twain