This week’s Pipeliners Podcast episode features first-time guest “Mr. Corrosion” Bob Franco of Franco Corrosion Consulting providing an introduction to the science of corrosion in pipelines.

In this episode, you will learn about the basics of corrosion, why cathodic protection is essential when dealing with corrosion, the role of pigging when dealing with corrosion, and more valuable topics for all pipeliners.

Introduction to Corrosion: Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms

• Bob Franco is the president of Franco Corrosion Consulting. Bob was a Sr. Materials & Corrosion Consultant for 44 years at ExxonMobil. Connect with Bob on LinkedIn.
  • Franco Corrosion Consulting offers consulting in corrosion mitigation, corrosion threat assessments, risk-based inspection planning, materials selection for upstream oil and gas production operations and new developments.
  • ExxonMobil is an American multinational oil and gas corporation headquartered in Irving, Texas.
  • NACE Book: Order “Corrosion Control in Petroleum Production, 3rd Edition” written by Bob Franco and Timothy Bieri and published by NACE.
• Corrosion is the deterioration of a steel pipeline that results from an electrochemical reaction with its immediate surroundings. 
• Metallurgical Engineers work with a variety of metals to design new products, refine the collection process, and create different blends of metal to suit specific needs.
• Ore is a natural rock or sediment that contains desirable minerals, typically metals, that can be extracted from it.
• Stored Energy eis energy possessed by a body as a result of its position or condition rather than its motion.
• Electrochemical Cell is a device capable of either generating electrical energy from chemical reactions or using electrical energy to cause chemical reactions.
• Electrolyte is a substance that produces an electrically conducting solution when dissolved in a polar solvent, such as water.
• Metallic Path is a conductor that allows electron movement within it under a potential difference or emf.
• Iron is Fe on the periodic table.
• Anode is an electrode through which the conventional current exits into the electrolyte.
• Conventional Current is the current that flows from + to – in a DC cell. It’s the opposite of electron flow, which is from – to +.
• Cathode is the electrode from which a conventional current leaves a polarized electrical device.
  • Cathodic Protection (CP) is a technique used to control the corrosion of a metal surface by making it the cathode of an electrochemical cell.
• Electron is a subatomic particle, symbol e⁻ or β⁻ , whose electric charge is negative one elementary charge. 
• Crystal Structure is a description of the ordered arrangement of atoms, ions or molecules in a crystalline material.
• Body Centered Cubic is a crystal system where the unit cell is in the shape of a cube. 
• Conductor is an object or type of material that allows the flow of charge in one or more directions.
• Dielectric Insulating Material is an electrical insulator.
• Sacrificial Element is a metal used as a sacrificial anode in cathodic protection that corrodes to prevent a primary metal from corrosion.
• Copper-Copper Sulfate Reference Electrode is used for measuring electrode potential and is the most commonly used reference electrode for testing cathodic protection corrosion control systems.
• AC an electric current that reverses its direction many times a second at regular intervals, typically used in power supplies.
• DC is the unidirectional flow of an electric charge.
• Pigging is the practice of using devices known as pigs or scrapers to perform various maintenance operations.

Introduction to Corrosion: Full Episode Transcript

Russel Treat:  Welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast, episode 121, sponsored by iPIPE, an industry-led consortium advancing leak detection and leak prevention technologies to eliminate spills as pipeliners move towards zero incidents. To learn more about iPIPE or to become an iPIPE partner, please visit ipipepartnership.com.

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Announcer:  The Pipeliners Podcast, where professionals, Bubba geeks, and industry insiders share their knowledge and experience about technology, projects, and pipeline operations. Now, your host, Russel Treat.

Russel:  Thanks for listening to the Pipeliners Podcast. I appreciate you taking the time, and to show that appreciation, we give away a customized YETI tumbler to one listener each episode. This week, our winner is Dusty Fontenot with Pembina Pipeline. Congratulations, Dusty, your YETI is on its way. To learn how you can win this signature prize pack, stick around until the end of the episode.

Before I introduce our guest, I want to take a moment to talk very briefly about the current COVID-19 emergency. As I record this intro, we are in the midst of the second week of the stay-at-home order here in Houston, Texas. And, I know that many people are interested — particularly in the control room — about business continuity and addressing things through the crisis.

To that end, I spent a fair amount of time writing an article — available both on my LinkedIn and at EnerSysCorp.com in the blog section — about a six-page article about all of the considerations and things you want to think about as it relates to COVID-19 and the 24/7 control room. I hope that’s of service to some people that are struggling to figure out how to keep product moving and to keep the lights on.

This week, our guest is Bob Franco. Bob retired after 44 years with Exxon as a senior materials and corrosion technical consultant. Since that time, he has been working as a consultant. During his career, Bob has written many papers and a corrosion book that is now available for sale. He continues to operate as an expert in the domain of corrosion.

Now, this is a subject I know very little about. So, listen as Bob joins us and I get educated.

Russel: Bob, welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast.

Bob Franco:  Thanks for inviting me, Russel. It’s my first one, so it’s a whole new experience for me.

Russel:  Tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into pipelining if you would, please.

Bob:  Sure. I have a bachelor’s and master’s degree in metallurgical engineering. When I joined Exxon, actually before the name Exxon was even invented and goes back to Esso, back in 1969, they put me into the corrosion area, and so I started that way. After 17 years of that in the downstream, moved to Houston and joined the upstream.

That’s where I really dove into pipelines with production pipelines, full well stream pipelines, water injection pipelines, multi-phase flow pipelines, and sales crude pipelines, dry and wet gas pipelines.

Russel:  I should probably make a public service announcement for the listeners. This is going to get rather technical. I’ve got to tell you, I’m excited about this one because corrosion is one of those things that every pipeliner ought to know about. I know how to say corrosion. I don’t have really a notion what it’s about.

I’m sitting here, Bob, your email is Mr. Corrosion. How did you come up to be called Mr. Corrosion?

Bob:  After being at ExxonMobil for 43 years, I knew I was going to retire. I was past 65 years old. I was using the Exxon email as my both personal, and private, and business, so I said, “I need my own email that says, ‘What the hell do I do?'” I said, “I do corrosion,” so I came up with Mr. Corrosion.

I liked it so much, I said, “I better take it in two different browsers just in case somebody likes it too and steals it from me.” [laughs]

Russel:  I think you at this point can consider yourself owning that moniker. The way to start this, I’ll just ask this question, what is corrosion?

Bob:  Let’s start with the basics. Just as a simple layman’s definition, corrosion is the deterioration of a material. That material is usually a metal, and this deterioration results from a chemical or electrochemical reaction with its environment.

Russel:  I think most pipeliners would understand a chemical reaction.

Bob:  Sure.

Russel:  Chemistry is the thing that nearly weeded me out of engineering school, so I’m reaching a bit. [laughs] What is an electrochemical reaction?

Bob:  It’s funny enough that as a metallurgical engineer, my undergrad school threw a ton of chemistry at me, including electrochemistry, so maybe that was a good thing. [laughs] Let’s start with, why do metals corrode in the first place? Let’s go back to real fundamentals.

You find a metal in the ground as an ore, like an iron ore. That’s not iron. That’s iron with oxygen and other things. Then you mine that ore, you extract the iron from the ore in furnaces, blast furnaces, with different things added into the melt. You then combine that iron with a little bit of carbon, and you make steel out of it. You melt it, you roll it, you reform it, you make pipelines out of it.

If you think about that entire chain of reaction, you have put one hell of a lot of energy into what was originally an iron ore. Now that pipeline has got a lot of stored energy in it all the way from the steelmaking process to the pipeline making process. Now, with all that stored energy, that pipeline wants to revert back to its original ore.

Corrosion is just a process of going back to your lowest energy state. “I want to go back to where I came from. I started out as an iron oxide. Oh, hell, I wanna go back as an iron oxide.” [laughs] That gives you an understanding of where the driving force is of corrosion.

Russel:  That seems too simple.

Bob:  That is simple, but I’m going to get a little more complicated now with the electrochemical question that you had. An electrochemical cell, we all know what a chemical reaction is, A + B goes to AB, whatever. They react together. They share electrons or however they bond together.

An electrochemical cell involves the transfer of both ions and electrons. It occurs in an electrolyte like water. It’s not just a chemical reaction where I mix two components together and get a direct chemical reaction. What’s going on in this water? When steel corrodes, a steel pipeline, which is primarily iron, it’s immersed in water.

In a pipeline, the water could be inside the line, and the water settled out at the bottom of the pipeline, or it could be outside the line. If it’s buried pipeline, the soil contains water. The soils are wet, typically. You immerse your iron in water. You have these iron atoms that are in the pipeline steel, and being in water, some iron atoms are pulled out of that crystal structure.

They’re released from the steel crystal structure, and they enter the water as an ion, an Fe with a +2 charge. You can see this is where the charge comes in. Now we have the fact that, while in the steel pipeline, the iron doesn’t have a charge. It’s neutral. If I take an Fe+2 out into the water, I have two electrons that were associated with that iron atom that have to go somewhere.

They migrate through a metallic path. They’re not going through the water, they’re staying in the structure, the metallic path. They need a metallic connection at this point. They travel through that, and they migrate to what we call the cathode of the cell. We have an anode where the corrosion occurred, where the iron left the lattice.

We have a cathode where these electrons are going to an electron sink. Now I have an electron flow, which, as you know, is a current and an ion flow because the positive ions, the iron +2, has to go towards where those electrons are, to balance out the pluses and minus charges.

Russel:  That’s the one thing that I remember from chemistry, is the pluses.

Bob:  Yeah, they always have to balance.

Russel:  The pluses and the minuses got to settle out.

Bob:  They got to even out. I’ve put these two electrons in there that are negative, so that iron +2 has to migrate in that direction. We have both a current flow and an ion flow going on here. That’s what makes it an electrochemical reaction. Current flow in the pipeline steel and an ion flow that’s in the water that’s causing that corrosion.

Russel:  I’ve got to ask you to step back. What causes the Fe+2? What causes that?

Bob:  If you have a crystal structure that has iron in it, that has an array of iron atoms laid out in a crystal structure like a cubic crystal structure that repeats, your pipeline’s got umpteen ump billions of these…

Russel:  That’s like looking at carbon atoms. They all have different shapes, and there’s a multitude of types of carbons. It all has to do with their crystalline shape determines what kind of carbon it is.

Bob:  Right, and the crystalline shape for iron is what’s called body centered cubic. If you imagine a cube, the corners of the cube have an iron atom. Body centered means if you drew a diagonal from all the cube to meet at the middle, you’ll get another iron atom in the middle, the center of that cube body. That’s a typical iron thing.

You’ve got these iron atoms there. In water, as I said, this whole thing is driven by the reversion back to the ore. There’s an energy situation. I’m trying to reduce the energy of this, so I’m extracting iron from that crystal structure and putting it back into the water, not as elemental Fe but as ionic Fe+2.

Russel:  [laughs] I have to come up with analogies that make this work in my head.

Bob:  What do you have?

Russel:  What I have is this. I’m thinking of the old balsa wood airplane that had the wind-up propeller, right?

Bob:  Right.

Russel:  I have the rubber, and I have to wind that rubber up. If I wind that rubber up, I’m storing energy in it.

Bob:  That’s correct. You’re putting in potential energy.

Russel:  I have to hold the propeller. As soon as I quit holding the propeller, the energy in that rubber band’s going to release into the propeller, the energy gets released as air movement, and I fly my little play airplane.

Bob:  Right.

Russel:  The analogy here would be everything I’m doing to take that iron ore, turn it into steel, and create this structure, I’m actually storing energy up. That stored energy is what allows it to hold the pressure.

Bob:  That stored energy is your rubber band analogy.

Russel:  The holding back is I don’t expose it to any electrolyte.

Bob:  That’s right.

Russel:  If I expose it to the electrolyte, then limiting the exposure to the electrolyte is what’s holding back the propeller.

Bob:  That’s a very fundamentally great understanding, Russel. I like that.

Russel:  Do I get an A on the exam, Bob?

Bob:  [laughs] I’ll give you a gold star when we’re done.

Russel:  [laughs]

Bob:  As long as there’s no electrolyte, there’s no corrosion. In pipelines, that’s water. Take away the water, we take away corrosion. There’s actually four elements of this corrosion cell, the electrolyte being one of four, but if you take that one away, the whole thing shuts down.

Russel:  You have to have all four.

Bob:  You will have all four, but you can get rid of any one of those four and shut down corrosion, or at least really slow it down. The first thing is you need the metal that’s going to corrode. The part of the metal that’s corroding is called the anode, the plus in a battery cell for example. Then you have the cathode, and that’s where it doesn’t corrode even though it’s part of the same pipeline.

In the electrolyte water, that’s where those little iron positive charge ions are moving in the water, heading in that direction. Then you have a metallic path, which is where the electrons are conveyed to go from the anode to the cathode. That’s just a metallic path, which in a pipeline is the pipeline. Look at it as one big conductor.

Russel:  Those electrons are there anyway. They’re moving around, but they need a place to run to.

Bob:  They need a place to run to. Here we have the electrolyte, which is the liquid that’s causing the corrosion. That allows the ionic motion. We have the anode. We have the cathode. The anode is where those iron atoms have left the crystal. The cathode is where the positive iron ions are migrating to. Then we have that metallic path, which allows the electrons to run around.

We have overall charge neutrality, but we have this dynamic situation where I’m dissolving my pipeline. If we could take any one of those four things and shut it down, we shut down corrosion. One that you mentioned very well was shut down the electrolyte, get rid of it. That’s not always the easiest thing to do, but you can.

Russel:  Removing water is…

Bob:  Yeah, think about gas pipelines. We do have dry gas pipelines. We dehydrate the gas. We take the water out of the gas.

Russel:  You think about a pipeline sitting in a tunnel versus sitting in the ground.

Bob:  Right.

Russel:  If I’m moving dry gas through a pipeline that’s in a dry environment, then I won’t have corrosion.

Bob:  Yes.

Russel:  The other part, there’s always economics around…What’s the economics around doing that?

Bob:  Exactly. Then you have to look at capex, opex issues of what’s cheaper. Should I design something in that I know is going to corrode, but it’ll last long enough? If I could design it to last long enough, it’s more economical than, say, dehydration or dewatering — there are those issues — then I’ll do it that way. What are the ways that we look at to stop that? One is coatings.

Let’s take the outside diameter of the pipeline. We always put a coating on that. That’s a primary physical barrier separating the steel pipeline from the wet soil. What is that coating? It’s just a high dielectric insulating material. It’s a non-metallic polymer.

Russel:  Wait, wait, wait. A high dielectric insulating material?

Bob:  In other words, it’s not a conductor of current. What we want to do here, we put this coating on.

Russel:  It’s really more than just keeping it dry.

Bob:  It’s keeping it dry.

Russel:  It’s also isolating the ability of those electrons to flow.

Bob:  It depends on which side is corroding. If the inside of the pipe is, those electrons are going to be flowing along the pipeline on the inside. If you take in just the soil side, those electrons are flowing on the outside of the pipeline. We put this dielectric in there, isolates the anode, the pipeline, from the soil, and doesn’t allow current flow to occur.

You and I know there’s no such thing as a perfect coating.

Russel:  No.

Bob:  They’re always going to have breaks in them. They’re called holidays.

Russel:  Why do they call those holidays?

Bob:  The only explanation I have heard that makes any sense is that the applicator of the coating…

Russel:  Took a day off.

Bob:  …took a mental or a physical day off, went on holiday, [laughs] and didn’t complete the job very well. [laughs] Whether that’s a true answer, I can’t answer that. [laughs] Of course, even if the coating was applied perfectly, it could become damaged in transit or during pipe laying.

Russel:  That answer works for me. That’s a good answer. Normally, most of those things, they come from something really simple, right? Like that.

Bob:  Yes. That’s it. That’s one thing. The coating works, but with no such thing as a perfect coating, we have breaks in the coating. Then the corrosion is going to occur at certain areas of the breaks in the coating. Then I add cathodic protection on the outside of the pipeline. I talk about having anodes and cathodes on the steel.

With cathodic protection, I take an anode that’s not part of the pipeline. I connect an anode that’s so much more active and eager to corrode than the pipeline. I connect it to the pipeline so that this is anode that I’ve put in is going to use itself up over time in protecting the pipeline. By doing that, it converts every anode on that pipeline into a cathode relative to itself. Therefore, the pipeline only consists of cathodes.

That’s why it’s called cathodic protection.

Russel:  I’m a sailor. In sailing, you’ve got your boat in the water. You’ve got metal. You’ve got your boat in saltwater, which is even more conductive than freshwater, right?

Bob:  Absolutely.

Russel:  I’ve got a prop in the water. That prop is metal. I’ve got a rod in the water or a shaft in the water. That’s metal that I need to protect. Then I’ve got metal on my rudder where it turns and such. I have to protect all that. The way I do that is I put what sailors would call a zinc. It’s a sacrificial element.

Bob:  That’s a sacrificial anode.

Russel:  It’ll go first before any of the other metal goes.

Bob:  All that’s doing is taking…It’s so much more active and wants to corrode.

Russel:  If you think about water runs downhill, another analogy. This is me processing what you’re telling me, trying to incorporate it into my understanding.

Bob:  Go right ahead.

Russel:  Water runs downhill, takes the path of least resistance. Electrons do the same thing. They’re going to run to that thing that has the least resistance to current flow.

Bob:  That zinc that you have on your boat is more eager to corrode. When you think about what I said earlier about the energies and what have you, it’s more eager to corrode than the steel pipeline would be.

By hooking them up together, I’m now saying I’m going to use this zinc to sacrifice itself and protect my boat components or pipeline. We don’t use zinc for pipelines very much because it depends on the water. Your boat is in freshwater or seawater?

Russel:  Saltwater.

Bob:  Saltwater. That zinc would be used up pretty quickly in saltwater. [laughs]

Russel:  I have somebody go and check it every three to four months. They check the bottom. They check the zinc.

Bob:  For seawater, you’d be better off with a different anode called activated aluminum or aluminum indium zinc. It has a better driving voltage. It won’t be consumed as quickly as the zinc would be. May be a little harder for you to find it, but that’s what we use for offshore pipelines.

Russel:  I’m making a note. Note to self. Contact Bob about zinc replacement for my boat.

Bob:  [laughs] Zinc is good for freshwater. It’s good for some soils.

Russel:  They’re inexpensive. The reason they’re used on boats, they’re inexpensive.

[crosstalk]

Bob:  They’re a throwaway commodity.

Russel:  You replace them frequently.

Bob:  Which would be hard to do in a pipeline, which is buried.

Russel:  That leads to my next question. An anode in cathodic protection is a sacrificial element, but it also has a current applied. How does applying an electrical current factor into all this?

Bob:  There’s two ways to do cathodic protection. One is to pick an anode that has a big difference in voltage potential to the steel you’re trying to protect. That’s called just a galvanic or sacrificial anode. You don’t actually need to apply an external current. It generates that because it’s so much more active and wants to corrode –more eager to corrode — than the pipeline is.

The other one is that you take an anode that wouldn’t really, on its own, corrode very much. It depends. There’s a whole mixture of these. Sometimes we use graphite for this. You put graphite. Then you apply external current to it. You take voltage from the city. You convert it from AC to DC and run a DC current to that graphite anode.

It becomes much more anodic than the pipeline you’re trying to protect, depending on how you’ve set up the polarity. You’ve got to remember you’re dealing with DC. If you reverse the polarity by accident, your pipeline will protect your graphite. You don’t want that to happen. [laughs]

Russel:  I’ve heard stories about that happening.

Bob:  Yeah, where they hooked it up wrong. In that case, you do need an external source of current. It’s not a self-generated current like your zinc example. I hope that helps you get the picture.

Russel:  It does. I don’t think I’m really clear about the electric. Being in the pipeline world, you get exposed to these things. You know about people that do things, but you don’t know why they’re doing them or how that works. I do know that there’s this conversation about, how much current do I apply? That is not necessarily the easiest thing to do.

It’s not like it’s this anode and this pipe so this current. There’s more factors that are involved.

Bob:  There are factors. One of the factors is the resistivity of the soil. It’s a big factor. The degree of wetness affects that. If the soil is dry, it could still be corrosive because it’ll be periodically wet. When it’s dry, it has pretty high resistance. Therefore, you have to overcome that higher resistance. In the design factor, that’s an issue.

The coating that I put on to protect the pipeline from the soil corrosion, I have to have a rough estimate —  these are in the design codes — of how much square foot or square meter of surface area is that coating not covering? That’s really what I’m working on with my cathodic protection. If it’s coated adequately, then I’ll never need the cathodic protection. The CP is only putting current into the holidays of the coating that expose bare pipeline steel.

The current’s going to travel along this high dielectric coating. It says, “Oh, there’s a hole in that coating. Low resistance path.” Zing. Goes right to that point and protects that holiday. How many holidays do you have? How much bare metal you’re trying to protect? A lot of codes give you some guidelines.

If it’s buried, they’ll tell you how many amps per square foot with the coating, without the coating. Then they’ll even have coating factors. As the pipeline ages, they’ll tell you how many years the amount of metal will increase. You take that into account. You over design the CP system to start with so that when it reaches towards the pipeline end of life, it’s still protective.

Russel:  One of the things that people that don’t understand the business is many of the pipelines we have in the U.S. are 30, 40 or 50 years old. People are like, “50-year-old metal, that can’t be safe.” The reality of it is if they’ve been properly protective…

Bob:  They’re fine.

Russel:  …they can be safe.

Bob:  They are fine.

Russel:  They can be as good as they were the day they were installed.

Bob:  Yes, that is absolutely true. That requires diligence in surveillance and monitoring. For example, again, taking just the soil side of the pipeline, you do your CP surveys. You measure their protective potential. If you reach what the standards say is a good potential for steel to be in a moist soil which is 850 millivolts with respect to a reference electrode, that’s called copper-copper sulfate reference electrode.

If your steel pipeline has that potential on it, then it’s well protected. If it’s less than that, it’s subject to have some corrosion. As you get further away from minus 850, let’s say to minus 500 or minus 400, then you’re into a real severe corrosion situation. If I was just to take a piece of steel without any coating or any CP on it and stick it in soil, I’d probably measure about minus 500 right with that.

You’re basically saying I’m not even protected at that point. That’s how we judge it. We do these surveys. They have test stations on pipelines that come to the rail where you could easily hook up your meter. You have something that’s touching the pipeline. You have the wire. You hook up your reference electrode to that and take your readings, but that’s not sufficient.

If you really want to protect your pipeline, particularly long pipelines, you have to take potential measurements along the length of the pipeline. That’s called an over the line survey, where you get a full survey.

Russel:  That leads, actually, to one of my questions. If everything’s the same, the metal’s all the same and the soil is all the same, then I can put anodes in and know what my protection is. The reality is things are not the same.

Bob:  They’re not.

Russel:  Particularly soil changes.

Bob:  They’re not.

Russel:  Water. You’re going to have spots where you’ve got more moisture and high spots where you don’t.

Bob:  You also have water table issues.

Russel:  Some of it’s seasonal.

Bob:  If you run under a road, for example, you have tarmac. The pipeline is below a tarmac or concrete area. The corrosive environment changes from that because of the amount of oxygen that is in the soil. The oxygen in the air would normally get through the soil okay but not so well through the tarmac and the concrete. You’re going to have an oxygen-deficient area.

That area will preferentially corrode to where you have more plentiful oxygen. You’ve got lots of differences in potential between the anodic and cathodic parts of the pipeline steel.

Russel:  It just proves what I believe to be true, which is everything is easy ’til you know enough.

Bob:  [laughs] This also goes on the inside of the pipeline. You have deposits sitting on the inside of the pipeline. Maybe you’re pigging. Maybe you’re not pigging.

Russel:  You could have water in your line too, right?

Bob:  You will have water in your line.

Russel:  Most gas gathering lines, particularly in these shale plays, have some amount of water in them.

Bob:  They will settle in elevation low spots. You’ll have other issues where certain corrosion deposits…

Russel:  How would you apply CP to the inside of the pipeline?

Bob:  You don’t, because you’ve got a problem with the inside of the pipeline, and that is, if I put an anode in a pipeline, a pipeline is maybe 36 inch diameter, typically 24 inch. I don’t have a coating usually on the inside of the pipeline. The current is going to go to the path of least resistance, which is going to go right past where my anode is, go to the immediate steel, not far away from the anode.

Current won’t travel because the resistance gets higher and higher the further I am from that anode. The longer the current has to travel, the greater the resistance becomes. CP is not applied, although I have seen it applied in super large diameter seawater lines, where people could walk in these lines standing up. They put anodes in at the joints areas, particularly if these are reinforced concrete.

They’re protecting the steel reinforcement. The inside of that pipeline, those waterlines, is coated. Without a coating, your path of least resistance says the current is not going to travel. You can’t do it, so how else do you protect the pipeline?

Russel:  I’ve got to tell you, Bob, I’m listening to this conversation, I’m starting to hit saturation.

Bob:  [laughs] Probably you’ve already hit cease as well.

Russel:  Probably this is a good place to stop, for now anyways, and we’ll come back and pick this up because I have a bunch of other questions I want to ask about corrosion.

Bob:  Absolutely, and the audience, I apologize if I’ve blown too much smoke your way. [laughs]

Russel:  If somebody were interested and wanted to get in touch with you, talk about corrosion, what’s the best way to reach you?

Bob:  mr.corrosion@yahoo.com.

Russel:  Perfect. Thanks, Bob. I appreciate it.

Bob:  Okay.

Russel:  I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of the Pipeliners Podcast and our conversation with Bob Franco. Just a reminder before you go, you should register to win our customized Pipeliners Podcast YETI tumbler. Simply visit pipelinepodcastnetwork.com/win to enter yourself in the drawing.

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Russel:  If you’ve got ideas, questions, or topics you’d be interested in, please let me know on the contact us page at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com, or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you next week.

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Transcription by CastingWords