AMI Consultant Assesses Outlook For Pipe Coating
Noru Tsalic, consultant at Applied Market Information (AMI), has revealed that oil prices are starting to rise again and that the outlook for pipe coating is very encouraging. According to Tsalic, who was speaking at the AMI conference on pipeline coating held in February 2010 in Vienna, Austria, the economic crisis has affected pipeline construction, as with many other industries, because of the lack of availability of finance for new projects and because of the drop in oil-and-gas prices. Russia has the largest natural-gas reserves and is in the top 10 for oil reserves. Transneft has 49,000km of pipelines and Gazprom has 169,000km of gas transmission systems. The most common onshore coating in the country is polyethylene. The average pipeline lifespan is 33 years and around 34 per cent of oil trunk lines are more than 30 years old, which shows the potential for market growth. In 2007, Exxonmobil was producing the equivalent of 4.2 million barrels of oil per day with seven new upstre...