Intact coatings and cathodic corrosion protection measures are indispensable for reducing the corrosion risk of buried pipelines.

However experience gathered from field excavations and new research hint that every coating is susceptible of disbonding over time and in some cases it is even leading to so called “shielding” conditions for the cathodic corrosion protection. In this paper the main reasons and mechanism of coating disbondment will be discussed. By analyzing the recent standards for pipeline coatings the most important properties of a coating to reduce the corrosion risk will be concluded.