Corrosion Consultancy and Asset Integrity Insurance

The core product of this discipline is a prediction, and the way predictions are consumed is what creates the liability.

A consultant measures wall thickness, assesses a mechanism, calculates a rate, and says an asset has a certain remaining life at current duty. That is a professional estimate with assumptions behind it: the duty staying as described, the mechanism continuing linearly, the inspection being representative, the environment not changing. Once it reaches the client it is stripped of all of that. It becomes a date in an integrity plan, a justification for deferring a shutdown, a line in a capital budget, and sometimes a submission to a regulator or an insurer. Nobody downstream sees the assumptions.

So the report has to carry the assumptions forward in a way that survives being summarised. State the duty and conditions the assessment depends on, state what would invalidate the figure such as a change in service, temperature, flow or product, specify the re-inspection interval rather than only the end date, and put the limitations in the body rather than only in an appendix. Where a client asks for a single number, give it with the condition attached in the same sentence, because that is the sentence that gets quoted.

Corrosion failures have a strong tendency to begin at exactly the locations an inspection did not reach, which puts an unusual weight on how a survey records its own gaps.

The places that cause trouble are consistent: under insulation, under supports and saddles where a pipe sits against steel, at soil to air interfaces, inside tanks that were not emptied, behind cladding, at splash zones, in crevices and under deposits, and anywhere scaffolding was not available on the day. The reasons for not inspecting them are usually reasonable: the plant was running, the client would not pay to strip lagging, the access was not provided, the shutdown window ran out. The failure then occurs there, and the report shows a satisfactory condition without obviously saying it covered only what was reachable.

So the discipline is to record exclusions as prominently as findings. List every area not inspected and why, mark it on the drawings or the isometric rather than in prose alone, state what should be inspected at the next opportunity, and where an inaccessible area is credible as a failure location, say that explicitly rather than neutrally. Where a client declines access or declines to strip insulation, that refusal belongs in the report and in the correspondence, because the alternative is a report that reads as a clean bill of health.

Where the consultancy extends from assessment into design, the nature of the exposure changes, because a designed system has an outcome that is measurable.

A cathodic protection system designed with insufficient current, badly distributed anodes, wrong anode material for the environment, inadequate reference electrodes, or without allowance for coating breakdown over time will underprotect the structure. A coating specification with the wrong product for the exposure, an unrealistic surface preparation standard, or an incorrect assumption about the substrate will fail early. In both cases the structure corrodes on a design that was supposed to prevent it, and the evidence is the design document.

So the controls are those of any engineering design. Design to a standard and say which, record the input data and where it came from since a design based on client supplied resistivity or environment data needs that provenance, allow for coating breakdown and for design life rather than day one performance, specify the monitoring that proves the system works, and make commissioning and verification part of the scope rather than somebody else's problem. Where a design is value engineered by others after you issue it, that change needs recording in writing.

Integrity reports travel further than most professional advice, and each new reader is a potential claimant.

A corrosion report is produced for an owner or operator and then used by an insurer assessing a risk, a purchaser in a transaction, a lender, a regulator, a main contractor, a tenant, or a subsequent owner who bought the asset partly on the strength of it. Any of them may say they relied on it. Some will ask for it to be addressed to them or for a reliance letter, usually at the point a deal is closing and there is pressure to agree quickly. Each one extends the number of parties who can bring a claim on a document whose scope was set for somebody else.

So reliance needs managing deliberately. State in the report who it is for and that others may not rely on it without written agreement, treat a reliance request as a decision with its own terms and its own limit rather than a formality, say no where the scope does not support the use being made of it, and tell your insurer where reliance letters are routinely given because it changes the risk. Practically, the other protection is the limitation period: keep continuity of cover, because a failure arriving six years after a report finds the policy in force then rather than the one you had when you wrote it.

Professional indemnity continuity is the thing that matters most here, because the failure arrives years after the report. We are an FCA regulated broker and will not tell you we are the best choice. These are the questions that decide it.