Rust: The Longest War

by Jonathan Waldman

  There’s always a reason

  A time or a season

  Conductive to copulation.

  So if you believe

  Metals really conceive,

  You ought to expect some gestation.

  The 1970s were a different time.

  Most corrosion engineers today are serious, conservative, and not especially social or rowdy or funny. Inquiring about rust jokes at Corrosion 2012, I got blank looks. “I can’t think of any rust jokes,” one corrosion consultant, known for his gregariousness, told me later. “Just wife jokes.” In two years of asking for rust jokes, I never found one. The handful of times rust has appeared in Sunday comics, the punch line was either from an auto mechanic saying, “Hey, you might wanna deal with this” when it was way too late, or a husband telling his wife, “I used your face cream to take the rust off my lawnmower—it works great!” The wife doesn’t look so contented.

  I overheard a brief conversation in which one corrosion engineer told another that, the night before, a bunch went to a karaoke bar and started singing.

  “Hey, who are you guys?” asked someone at the bar.

  “We’re corrosion engineers,” he responded.

  Then the bar cleared out.

  Some 93 percent of corrosion engineers are men. There’s no official data on what fraction of them have mustaches, but my estimate is high. The field is full of stable old-timers: 40 percent have been working in corrosion for twenty or more years, most of those at the same big (five hundred or more employees) company. A clue to their habits may be gleaned from the degree to which NACE International’s annual golf tournament exceeds the annual NACE RACE 5K in popularity. Another clue can be gleaned from Marco De Marco’s winning times, which in 2011 and 2012 were not under twenty minutes.

  Surprisingly, they are not especially educated: fewer than one in three have a bachelor’s degree. One in ten have a master’s degree; one in sixteen have a PhD. The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) does not recognize corrosion engineers as professional engineers, mechanical, civil, electrical, or otherwise. California briefly licensed professional corrosion engineers but ended the practice in 1999. NACE does not keep track of how many of its corrosion engineers are licensed professional engineers but thinks it’s most of them. This seems unlikely. One in four corrosion engineers holds other professional certification, from the American Petroleum Institute, or the American Welding Society, or ICORR, the Institute of Corrosion.

  Education notwithstanding, the average annual salary of a corrosion engineer is just shy of $100,000. This is significantly better than the averages for architects and engineers, as the Department of Labor sees it. Roughly 11 percent of corrosion engineers make more than $150K; 4 percent make more than $200K. Salaries are going down in Europe but are on the rise in the United States. Those who make the most work for tiny companies or huge ones, or live in Alaska, where oil flows like the Yukon.

  A quarter of American corrosion engineers live in Texas, though corrosion engineers reside in all fifty states and DC. Just as many hail from the rest of the world, in 110 different countries. There’s one corrosion engineer in Botswana, one in Côte d’Ivoire, one in Equatorial Guinea, one in Zambia, one in Uzbekistan, one in Macau, and one in Tahiti. They gather locally in 120 “sections”; as expected, the Houston section is the largest. Notwithstanding the Texas oil and gas clique, corrosion engineers are dispersed widely among us.

  Wherever they are, they tend to wish their work—and trade—was more widely appreciated. In that same NACE survey, corrosion engineers submitted these comments:

  “There seems to be a perception that my job is just to make other people’s jobs more difficult.”

  “Generally, the uninformed hold positions of power and routinely make bad decisions.”

  “It just seems in our industry we are always reacting to unprotected situations instead of being out front managing the systems at a protected level.”

  “In a lot of circles, we are a nuisance rather than an integral part of the process.”

  “People often cut the budget and then wonder why they have an issue five years later.”

  Kevin Garrity, NACE International’s president from 2012 to 2013, told me he knows three people who left their jobs because their bosses ignored their work. Ray Taylor, the head of the National Corrosion Center who said corrosion was “sort of the wart on the ass of the pig,” elaborated. “This is not a sexy thing to get involved with. They put it off. They say, ‘We’ll just wait a little bit.’ It just goes on and on and on. It’s been surpassed in the science arena by other areas, but we’ve forgotten—we haven’t even finished the basics yet. So many things have been put off to the side, and we haven’t gotten to them. Okay, we’ve got all these people who do accounting and so on, but let’s do a life-cycle analysis. If we just let this go, and break, and repair it then, is that cheaper than if you did a little corrosion control? People haven’t done a good job with that.”

  Though the United States is home to dozens of men named Will Rust—writers and lawyers and graphic designers and programmers and sales managers among them—not one is a corrosion engineer. George Washington Rust, who came to my town 140 years ago to recover from tuberculosis, knew finance and cattle but not corrosion. Neither Russel Bits nor Russell Parts is a corrosion engineer, and Russel Auto Parts, for that matter, seems like a bad name for a business. Rusty Auto Parts? Russell Stough does not pronounce his name Rusty Stuff. The most popular first names of corrosion engineers are John, David, Michael, Robert, James, William, Richard, Mark, Paul—as if their calling is biblical. More corrosion engineers are named David Miller than anything else. Michael Jones, John Wilson, and Richard Smith are the next most common. The best clue to their diversity comes from their last names, the most popular of which are Smith, Wang, Zhang, Johnson, Li, Lee, Kim, Williams, and (fittingly) Brown. Three corrosion engineers are named Mohammed (or Mohammad) Ali. One corrosion engineer in Ohio, named Steven, who has a PhD in mathematical statistics, really is Dr. Rust. Another, in Florida, who has a PhD in metallurgical engineering, and the surname of Heidersbach, calls himself Dr. Rust. Ten corrosion engineers are named Rusty. Rusty Strong, of noncancelable auto insurance, believes he has the best name in the industry. “You know Catch-22,” he said. “I’m like Major Major Major.” Rusty made a conscious decision to put his nickname on his business card when he joined NACE. It got him onto the board.

  NACE’s roots lie so deep within the oil and gas industry that the organization has struggled to drop the reputation ever since. Eleven oil and gas men founded it in 1943 to study the determent of corrosion in pipelines. The mustache-free founders elected as their first president R. A. Brannon, of Humble Pipe Line. So as not to appear singularly devoted to the oil and gas industry—an entirely warranted assessment—the board selected as chairman of its technical committees a metallurgist named R. B. Mears. He had a PhD from Cambridge University and was chief of Alcoa’s chemical metallurgy division. His neatly parted silver hair, rimless glasses, and effeminate lips gave him a scholarly demeanor; his colleagues, on the other hand, appeared thuggish, as if planning to give corrosion a beating. Mears looked more like a preacher than an oil and gas man, and this suited NACE well. Yet well into the 1960s, NACE’s bent as an oil-and-gas affair persisted. Dale Miller, who began working as an editorial assistant at Corrosion in 1958, told Lyle Perrigo, the author of a slim history of NACE, that he didn’t realize NACE wasn’t solely pipeline oriented until 1966, by which point he’d been working there for eight years.

  Though NACE grew rapidly—gaining more than a thousand members in its first five years, and another three thousand in the subsequent five—the organization had difficulty recruiting. Frans Vander Henst, secretary of NACE’s technical committees from 1958 until 1965, told Perrigo about the military’s reaction: “[I]t was a surprise that there was actually something you can do about their problems.” He recalled the solution devised by an officer in Guam to keep jeeps a
nd planes from rusting away. “He did not know what to do except to run them off the runway and drop them into the ocean.” Henst collected addresses of military bases, and to them, attention maintenance officers, sent information. They came to meetings, slowly. Plumbers, though, were a different breed. “We have not made any inroads with the plumbers yet,” Henst recalled. “They kept telling us they did not want to solve problems because about fifty to sixty percent of their work was in repairing systems. They were very, very adamant that they did not want to solve the problems.” NACE does not count among its corporate members the American Society of Plumbing Engineers, the International Association of Plumbing and Mechanical Officials, the Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors Association, or the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipe Fitting Industry of the United States, Canada and Australia. At the annual conference, I did not see a single plumber.

  NACE, a $25 million nonprofit, makes money a few different ways. One-eighth of the dollars it collects come from individual and corporate members, including DuPont, Bechtel, Sherwin-Williams, BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell; Abtrex, Aztech, Exova, Lintec, Sprayroq, and Termarust; Dan Dunmire’s office in the DOD, and Tinnea & Associates. Another sixth it collects when these companies pay $25 per square foot for booths at annual corrosion conferences, selling their rebar, paints, and badass X-ray fluorescence detectors. NACE makes half of its revenue through its corrosion courses. The photo on the cover of its 2012 course catalog is one of my favorites in the industry. It shows nine guys sitting and standing around a table, studying for a test. All five on one side of the table have mustaches, as if in battle with the bare upper-lipped four on the other. NACE’s courses fall more or less into three categories: basics, coatings application or inspection, and cathodic protection. Some are pipeline themed or marine themed or wastewater themed or nuclear themed. The generic five-day courses cost about a thousand bucks; the industry-themed ones cost nearly double that. Daily, that’s more expensive than an Ivy League education, which comes with room and board.

  In 2010 NACE reported that ten of its staff earned more than $100K, some nearly $200K. The organization has also officially begun lobbying. In Pennsylvania and Ohio, it supported the campaigns of two Republican representatives running for office. Rust could be a progressive issue, but interwoven as it is with Big Industry, it leans right.

  NACE also sells a wide variety of industry-specific textbooks. If you’re looking for a rust joke, these publications are a certain dead end. Most of the books cover the particulars of corrosion science, the behaviors of various metals, the oil and gas industry, or paints. Titles include The Water Dictionary, Deep Anode Systems, Practical Chlorine Dioxide, Concrete: Building Pathology, and Coatings Tribology. The best coatings book is hands-down Fitz’s Atlas of Coating Defects, an expensive but easy-to-use visual guide to the various ailments that may afflict a coating. A coating may be cheesy, checked, rippled, wrinkled, peppery, seedy, saponified, crocodiled (or alligatored), cratered, crazed, cobwebbed, crow’s-footed, or cracked, like mud or stars. It may look, technically, like an orange peel. It may appear flocculated, or have fish eyes, or be flaking. It may be blistering, bubbling, cissing, disbonded, delaminated, pinholed, peeling, or just plain undercured. Given that level of precision, it’s not surprising that Corrosion Testing Made Easy is a six-book set costing $500. Most of the textbooks that NACE sells cost around $100, and a few approach $1,000. A NACE employee told me that they are very profitable. The organization’s various publications contribute the final sixth of its revenue.

  One of the cheapest books that NACE sells is a cartoon book called Inspector Protector and the Colossal Corrosion Fighters. It was published in 2004 as an educational booklet for kids in the vein of Marvel Comics. The good guys total five. There’s Inspector Protector, masked and caped in blue, with Superman-like abs. There’s Dr. Forbidden, bearded and bespectacled, in a white-lab coat, and in possession of a jar of steaming green corrosion inhibitor. There’s SuperCoat, the brunette “coatings gal,” with two tanks strapped to her back and a very assertive paint gun. There’s Captain Cathode, a sort of Terminator-like android, and his smaller, stouter Awesome Anodes. Finally, there’s Smart Pig, who looks like a cross between a college football coach and an actual pig, with a radio collar and a red light on his head.

  Together, the good guys fight Count Corrosion, who has a sickly green pallor, greasy black hair, and an unforgiving, Transylvanian facial structure stuck in a permanent grimace. Count Corrosion works alongside his evil swarm of Grubbz—giant six-legged termites who crouch like Sméagol in Lord of the Rings and go crunch! and chomp! as they gobble away.

  In sixteen pages, the protagonists go from the Statue of Liberty to the Golden Gate Bridge to Edmonton, Alberta, to—cliffhanger, here—an airplane, about to lose a wing.

  Sploosh! Splat! Whoops! Thwack!

  Biceps bulge. Clenched fists fly. Weapons are raised.

  Our hero corrosion fighters appear young, strong, and vibrant. They’re fast acting. They live not in Houston but in some sort of flying fortress. They report to no bosses, obey no budgets, put up with no regulations or layers of company or government bureaucracy. Our heroes don’t sport compensatory mustaches or cell phone holsters or pocket protectors. They wear their underwear on the outside. Nor do they attend dull meetings in Salt Lake City. The book ought to have been the best-selling product at the convention.

  * * *

  1. I checked out the XRF detector on a book of metal samples. It works because every element, aside from the noble gases, from magnesium on up fluoresces uniquely when bombarded with X-rays. According to guys on the floor of the convention center, the drill-sized tool is “the shit” for identifying the composition of, say, unknown pipelines. The tool has one detector but sends three or four beams to be sure it’s accurate. It works in seconds. It’s way easier than cutting out a sample and sending it to a lab. Though I need the tool in my daily life about as much as I need a bulldozer, I want one.

  9

  PIGGING THE PIPE

  MILE 0

  Three hundred miles into the Arctic, at the northern terminus of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS), a forty-one-year-old engineer named Bhaskar Neogi hummed Beethoven. He was sitting in the Maintenance Tech Office of Pump Station 1, thinking about rust. Oil and gas men like Neogi tend not to like the word rust, though. They call it black powder, and they call corrosion engineering “integrity management.” Officially, Neogi is the pipeline’s integrity manager. He is responsible for keeping the pipeline intact, whole. Most pipeline operators employ integrity managers, but most pipelines are not like the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System. From Prudhoe Bay to Prince William Sound, TAPS stretches eight hundred miles, which leaves Neogi accountable for one of the heaviest metal things in the Western Hemisphere, through which the vast majority of Alaska’s economy flows. Daily, the four-foot steel tube spits out $50 million of oil. Even for an engineer as bright and focused as Neogi, such accountability is awesome. That’s why, in March 2013, he was humming Beethoven. He was anxious. After more than a year of preparation, he was about to launch a $2 million rust-detecting robot through the pipeline, and he was worried about the robot’s ability to perform, let alone survive, the long journey.

  The robot was a “smart pig,” sixteen feet long and more than ten thousand pounds, and suggestive of a giant centipede. In the cavernous manifold room on the other side of Pump Station 1, it sat on a tray just inside an orange bay door. Outside the door, it was ten below and windy. Inside, where it was warm, four technicians from Baker Hughes, the pig’s manufacturer, wrapped up a third day of checking and double checking and triple checking its componentry. Among other things, in the front segment of the pig, between two yellow urethane cups, they checked 112 magnetic sensors mounted in between 112 pairs of magnetized brushes. These sensors would detect the magnetic field induced in the pipe as the pig, propelled by the flow of oil, traveled through it. Given any kind of
anomaly in the half-inch steel—a pit, a ding, a thin spot—the field would change, and the sensors would capture this and record it on a hard drive. Inch by inch, the sensors would capture this information; Neogi hoped they would capture all seven billion square inches of the pipe. That’s 1,200 acres. Using all that data, Neogi would determine the most vulnerable spots on the pipeline, dig them up, and repair them before they became leaks.

  Neogi was humming because no matter how extensively the technicians double checked, even the most advanced pig can’t perform its inspection if the wall of the pipe is covered in wax. Wax, a natural component of crude oil, keeps the magnetic brushes and sensors off the steel wall. The consistency of lip balm or mousse, it plugs up caliper arms that measure the shape of the pipe, and snags odometer wheels. Wax renders smart pigs senseless, leaving them blind, dumb, and amnesiac. Nor can a pig survive a violent voyage. Too fast, and sensor heads melt or crack. Too rough, and the magnetizing brushes wear down. Too jarring, and the universal joint between the pig’s two segments comes apart, wires snap, and power to the magnetic flux sensors is cut off. Poof goes the data, months of work, and millions of dollars—leaving engineers with a pipeline in indeterminate condition, regulators unhappy, and the public at risk. Wax accumulates when the oil cools below 75 degrees, and long, slack sections, where the pig can barrel down mountain passes at high speed, manifest themselves when there’s not much oil flowing through the pipe. Neogi was well aware that it was winter, and that the flow of oil through TAPS was as low as it had been. It was not the best of times to pig. Yet he had faith.