Diakont announced today that it is part of a team that was awarded $5 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E). This award will be used to develop new technologies for rehabilitating legacy cast iron and bare steel natural gas distribution pipelines, by building new, robust replacement pipe inside the existing pipelines. Diakont’s team for this program includes the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and LifeLast.
“The success of this research program is critical for ensuring the safety of our communities,” declared Edward Petit de Mange, Managing Director at Diakont. “Conducting this pipeline remediation in-situ requires overcoming substantial technical challenges, but our team is implementing reliable, economical solutions that will accomplish just that. The rehabilitation of these legacy pipelines to extend their safe operating life is needed to ensure the continued reliability of our natural gas supply system, particularly in cities where excavation is impractical, or in some cases impossible.”
San Diego-based Diakont is an industry leader in the development and use of innovative robotic technologies that support oil and gas operations, often for the purpose of extending the safe operating life of system assets, through new methods of inspection and remediation.
Diakont received this competitive award via ARPA-E’s Rapid Encapsulation of Pipelines Avoiding Intensive Replacement (“REPAIR”) program, whose objective is to develop technologies to reduce natural gas leaks from legacy pipelines by developing a suite of technologies that enable the automated construction of new pipe inside existing pipe. The technologies that Diakont and its REPAIR teammates are developing aim to extend the safe operating life of rehabilitated pipes by at least 50 years, while working toward a 10x to 20x reduction in cost per mile.
