A Construction Project Bigger Than the U.S. Interstate System

…The whole oil and gas infrastructure is a “vast spider web of steel.” There are over 335,000 miles of pipelines in the U.S. alone. There are hundreds of refineries in the world, as well as thousands of tank farms, gas stations, and oil and gas wells.

Such infrastructure requires a lot of maintenance, which is not cheap. On the heels of two decades of low oil prices, much of the industry deferred a lot of maintenance. As Simmons says: “The entire value chain is built of steel. Steel begins to corrode the day it is cast.”


The risk of failure