Freeze plugging helps warm the hearts of Chinchilla

The iPipe team operating in the Surat Basin have scooped up some awards within Monadelphous for their safety innovation, ‘Freeze Plugging’.    

Freeze Plugging involves cryogenically cooling the outer wall of a pipe using liquid nitrogen to freeze the liquid contained within, to form a solid plug, providing a positive form of isolation. This allows for the safe change out of corroded or seized valves without affecting the customer’s production capacity. 

This clever isolation method has had an immensely positive effect on safety, cost and production, and has been found to be very transferable, adaptable and successful when applied to other scopes of work and applications. 

The iPipe team were joint winners of the 2021-2022 Managing Director’s Safety Innovation Award announced by Rob Velletri.  

Manager CSG, Damian O’Connor did the honours of presented the winning cheque to the team’s chosen charity ‘Kup of Kindness’, an organisation that provides food and meals for homeless and disadvantaged people within the Chinchilla district.  

The team were then also awarded for the Best Safety Innovation at the 2022 M&IS Strategy and Awards on 13 December.  

There are a number of deciding factors for this award, including the effectiveness of the innovation in reducing risk, the degree of originality and creativity, the transferability of the innovation other parts of the business and the cost of implementation.   

The innovation has been a great success and led to both cost savings and greater efficiencies for the customer, making them highly deserving winners – congratulations to the iPipe team!