Saudi Arabia’s extensive hydrocarbon transport infrastructure requires integrity decisions that simultaneously protect containment, sustain delivery reliability and allocate inspection expenditure efficiently. This critical review evaluates research published between 2020 and 2025 on corrosion prediction, in-line inspection, probabilistic failure assessment, risk-based inspection and lifecycle intervention planning. Rather than treating inspection intervals as fixed administrative periods, the paper develops a corrosion-informed decision framework linking threat identification, measurement uncertainty, remaining-strength assessment, consequence modelling and risk-constrained economic optimisation. Evidence is synthesised across buried transmission lines, offshore segments and operationally complex assets, with explicit attention to conditions relevant to Saudi Arabia: heterogeneous desert soils, saline coastal exposures, variable water chemistry, geographically dispersed routes and strategic dependence on uninterrupted energy transport. The review finds that probabilistic degradation models offer more defensible inspection scheduling than deterministic extrapolation where repeated observations exist, while data-driven predictors remain constrained by transferability, sparse failures and inconsistent defect matching. It argues for staged deployment: establish traceable asset data, classify governing threats, calibrate deterioration models, validate inspection performance and select interventions using both tolerable risk and expected lifecycle cost. Two conceptual figures and two synthesis tables translate this evidence into implementable decisions. The contribution is an integrative review and proposed governance architecture, not a claim of new pipeline measurements or validated Saudi field performance. Priorities for subsequent research include locally calibrated corrosion datasets, uncertainty-aware model evaluation, interacting-threat assessment and transparent economic verification of intervention policies.