Facility Grounding & Bonding

Tank battery infrastructure at production and saltwater disposal facilities comprises of steel and fiberglass tanks that are interconnected with steel and fiberglass pipes both on the top and at the bottom. There are many isolated metal components on each of the tanks that might be a source of static discharge during nearby lightning activity. Static discharges also originate from the flow of volatile fluids.

To minimize the risk of static discharge from the isolated metal bodies, before any of the static mitigation and lightning dissipation devices are installed, it is important that all the metal infrastructure including isolated metal components are electrically bonded to a common grounded backbone.

Petro Guardian’s Best Practices recommends establishing the base bonding with a common grounded backbone using a Class 1 lightning protection cable. The grounding and bonding backbone is designed to carry both static charges and lightning currents that get induced or directly injected onto the facility.