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Episode 213: 2021 in Review and Looking to 2022 for the Pipeliners Podcast with Russel Treat

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The first Pipeliners Podcast episode of the new year features host Russel Treat recapping events of the past year and looking ahead to 2022.

In this episode, Russel recaps the story of the Pipeliners Podcast from its inception in November 2017 to where it is now continuing to deliver education through conversation to pipeliners on a global basis. You will also learn about the plans for 2022, including the growth of the Pipeline Podcast Network.

2021 in Review and Looking to 2022 for the Pipeliners Podcast Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms:

  • API (American Petroleum Institute) has developed more than 700 standards to enhance industry operations. Today, it is the global leader in convening subject matter experts to establish, maintain, and distribute consensus standards for the oil and natural gas industry. [Access episodes with API guests.]
  • The ROSEN Group is a worldwide provider of cutting-edge solutions in all areas of the integrity process chain. Innovation, know-how, and a strict orientation on customer needs are the key factors of ROSEN’s unique success story. [Access episodes with Rosen guests.]
  • Burns & McDonnell is a full-service engineering, architecture, construction, environmental, and consulting solutions firm, based in Kansas City, Missouri. [Access episodes with Burns & McDonnell guests.]
  • EnerSys Corporation delivers software solutions and subject matter expertise for pipeline control room management, SCADA, scheduling, leak detection, and interaction with field operations. EnerSys leverages the capabilities of POEMS™ Certified software tools and industry expertise to support natural compliance.
  • Gas Certification Institute (GCI) provides crude, NGL, and gas measurement training, measurement standard operating procedures (SOPs), and field operations software tools.
  • P.I. Confluence (PIC) provides software and implementation expertise for pipeline program governance that is applied to operations, Pipeline SMS, and compliance. PIC leverages process management software to connect programs to implementation. [Access episodes with P.I. Confluence guests.]
  • Satelytics is the foremost remote sensing leader with a full staff of Ph.D. level expertise. The company uses proven science, adept software, and powerful technology to meet the toughest business challenges. [Access episodes with Satelytics guests.]
  • Energy Worldnet is a professional services firm serving the energy and utility industries. [Access episodes with Energy Worldnet guests.]
    • Steve Allen is the Executive Director of Pipeline Safety for Energy Worldnet.
  • iPIPE (the Intelligent Pipeline Integrity Program) is an industry-led consortium whose focus is to contribute to the advancement of near-commercial, emerging technologies to prevent and detect gathering pipeline leaks as the industry advances toward the goal of zero incidents. [Access episodes with iPIPE guests.]
  • PHMSA (Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration) is the federal agency within USDOT responsible for providing pipeline safety oversight through regulatory rulemaking, NTSB recommendations, and other important functions to protect people and the environment through the safe transportation of energy and other hazardous materials.
  • Pipeline SMS (Pipeline Safety Management Systems) or PSMS is an industry-wide focus to improve pipeline safety, driving toward zero incidents.
  • Giancarlo Milano is a Principal Simulation Engineer at Atmos International. Connect with Giancarlo on LinkedIn.
  • Marc Lamontagne is the president of the Lamontagne Pipeline Assessment Corporation. Connect with Mark on LinkedIn.
  • Inline Inspection (ILI) is a method to assess the integrity and condition of a pipe by determining the existence of cracks, deformities, or other structural issues that could cause a leak.
  • Clint Bodungen is an ICS cybersecurity guru, the author of “Hacking Exposed: Industrial Control Systems,” and he teaches at the Gas Certification Institute (GCI). Connect with Clint on LinkedIn.
  • Pascal Ackerman is a Principal Analyst in Industrial Threat Intelligence & Forensics and the author of Industrial Cybersecurity. Pascal is also part of the ThreatGEN team. Connect with Pascal on LinkedIn.
  • Marathon Pipe Line (MPL) is a subsidiary of Marathon Petroleum Corporation that owns, operates, and develops midstream energy infrastructure assets. MPL operates pipelines, storage tanks, and barge dock facilities.
    • Dan Sensel is the Leak Detection Project Lead at Marathon. Find and connect with Dan on LinkedIn.
    • Jason Dalton is the leak detection and hydraulics supervisor at Marathon. Find and connect with Jason on LinkedIn.
    • Kyle Miller is the pressure control process lead at Marathon. Find and connect with Kyle on LinkedIn.
    • Justin Shannon is a Strategy Advisor at Marathon. Connect with Justin on LinkedIn.
      • Episode 120: Risk Management – How to Start with Justin Shannon.
      • Episode 78: Risk Management in Pipeline Operations with Justin Shannon.
  • Larry Shelton, now retired, began his pipeline career with The Alyeska Pipeline Service company (TAPS) in Alaska in 1979, working in Operations & Engineering from 1979 to 1993. He transferred to ARCO Pipe Line Company in 1993 as Manager of ARCO’s GC Marine Terminals and Offshore Pipelines and later as the Manager of Environment, Health, and Safety.
    • The Bellingham Pipeline Incident (Olympic Pipeline explosion) occurred on June 10, 1999, when a gas pipeline ruptured near Whatcom Creek in Bellingham, Wash., causing deaths and injuries. Three deaths included 18-year-old Liam Wood and 10-year-olds Stephen Tsiorvas and Wade King.
      • Listen to Episode 79 of the Pipeliners Podcast for Larry’s first-hand account of the incident.
  • EnerACT offers niche capability and expertise specific to the multiple operating domains within a pipeline operation, then leverages the success of each entity across the entire set of capabilities.
  • Pipeline Technology Podcast (PTP) is hosted by Russel Treat and sponsored by Pipeline & Gas Journal (PGJ). Each monthly episode focuses on a specific area of current and emerging pipeline technology. The goal is to provide pipeline professionals with a greater understanding of the latest use of technology and upcoming trends that will impact how pipeliners perform their work.
    • Pipeline & Gas Journal (PGJ) is the essential resource for technology and trends in the midstream industry; written and edited to be of service to those involved in moving, marketing, and managing hydrocarbons from the wellhead to the ultimate consumer. 

2021 in Review and Looking to 2022 for the Pipeliners Podcast Full Episode Transcript:

Russel Treat:  Welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast, Episode 213, sponsored by EnerACT Energy Services, supporting pipeline operators to achieve Natural Compliance through plans, procedures, and tools implemented to automatically create and retain records as work is performed. Find out more at EnerACTEnergyServices.com.

[background music]

Announcer: The Pipeliners Podcast, where professionals, Bubba geeks, and industry insiders share their knowledge and experience about technology, projects, and pipeline operations. And now, your host, Russel Treat.

Russel Treat: Thanks for listening to the Pipeliners Podcast. I appreciate you taking the time. To show that appreciation, we give away a customized YETI tumbler to one listener every episode. This week, our winner is Scott Montgomery with Delek Logistics. Congratulations, Scott. Your YETI is on its way. To learn how you can win this signature prize, stick around to the end of the episode.

This week, you get Russel Treat. We are without a guest. We’re in the midst of the Christmas/New Year’s break. I just took a pause between a couple of college football bowl games to get this Pipeliners Podcast recording in the can. What I’m going to do is I’m going recap a little bit about 2021, talk a little bit about what’s coming up in 2022.

To start, what I want to talk about is how far we’ve come since I started this. The podcast was started in November of 2017. At that time, I thought I had an idea, but I had no idea if anybody would listen or if it would catch on. Now, we’re a little bit past 200 episodes, and this podcast has certainly developed a life of its own.

I need to thank the sponsors. Costs a bit of money to produce this thing. We have a website that we support. We do transcripts for every episode. There are backgrounds on every guest. There’s the sound production and logistics of getting everything out. We send out a newsletter once a month that gives people a synopsis of all the episodes.

There’s quite a lot of moving parts to doing all of this. It wouldn’t be possible without the sponsors. We’ve had a number of sponsors since we started this. We did the first year out of our own pocket and then started to take sponsors in the second year.

I want to mention some of them in particular. Babst Calland, which is the law firm that Keith Coyle works for, has become an underwriting sponsor. They allow us to get access to Keith, and Keith has been on a bunch of times. I am going to talk a little more about that here in a bit, but we really appreciate them.

We’ve had American Petroleum Institute, ROSEN, Burns & McDonnell, EnerSys Corporation, Gas Certification Institute, P.I. Confluence, Satelytics, Energy Worldnet. All have been sponsors.

I want to make a special shout-out to iPIPE. iPIPE was one of our first sponsors. If you don’t know anything about IPIPE, I would encourage you to go to the Pipeliners Podcast website, go to the sponsors’ page, and look them up. They do some really interesting work helping to commercialize technology that’s needed to improve safety performance of pipeline operations.

Of course, got to recognize the guests. Ross Adams is one of those guys that’s been on eight times. He’s one of those guys I’ll often reach out to when I have an idea about control room and often don’t give him a lot of time to prep, but he’s been really awesome.

Keith Coyle, who I mentioned, has become our go-to guy for all things regulatory rulemaking. He’s also been on a total of eight times and has covered all kinds of topics around regulatory rulemaking, PHMSA, how they adjudicate, and all that type of thing, so been a very valuable contributor.

Giancarlo Milano, who hasn’t been on in quite some time, we did eight episodes with him about everything around the fundamentals of leak detection. That remains very good content. If you need to know about leak detection or have an interest in learning about it, I’d recommend you go there.

Same thing, Mark Lamontagne. He’s been on a total of seven times. Again, hadn’t been on in a while, but did a great series on all things inline inspection, covered all the various tool types, how they work, how they’re used, and the technology and so forth. If you’re needing to learn about what inline inspection or ILI is, then those are great episodes to go back and listen to.

Steve Allen, who’s been on more recently, his subject that he loves to talk about is pipeline safety management. We’ve had him on a bunch of times to talk about that.

Clint Bodungen, been on a number of times and does great stuff related to cybersecurity and how cybersecurity relates to pipelining. His partner in crime, Pascal Ackerman, has also been on a bunch and covered some of the same material.

Then I also want to shout out to the Marathon trio, Jason Dalton, Dan Sensel, and Kyle Miller. We did some great episodes. I haven’t had those guys on in a while. I’ve been trying to get them back. They’ve all moved around in their roles at Marathon. It’s become more difficult to get them all scheduled. Did some great episodes with those guys. Probably my favorite is what every engineer wants the business development guys to know about pipeline hydraulics. That’s a fun one. It’s also got a bunch of great information.

I want to, in particular, shout out to Larry Shelton. Larry is a retired pipeline executive. He had the unique experience of being directly involved with the Bellingham incident. He shared that experience. That episode has now been downloaded over a thousand times. If you haven’t heard that episode, episode 79, I recommend you go listen to it. Everybody who works in pipeline should listen to that episode. It’ll really make you appreciate what we do, why it’s important, and how it matters to our communities. Shout out to Larry for sharing that experience.

I also want to shout out to our most downloaded episode. Justin Shannon has been on a couple of times, and he’s done some episodes on risk management, both of which have been downloaded over a thousand times, and one of which has been downloaded over 1,100 times, making that the most downloaded episode. He does a great job of taking the mystery out of risk management, explaining what it is, how it’s done, and how it’s used, really great information. I recommend you go look him up and listen to his episodes.

I don’t talk about it very much, but there’s a whole team around the podcast that do various things to help the podcast get produced. Probably one of the most important is the sound. Chuck Dotson, who I’ve known a long time, is a good friend and has worked within ministry around my church and other things, does all the sound work on the podcast. His job is to make us easy to listen to and sound intelligent. He cuts out all the ums and uhs, the coughs, and when we run down a rabbit trail we shouldn’t run down, he manages to cut all that stuff out, put it all together, balance the sound, and make this thing sound great. I really appreciate the work he does.

James Caldwell is our copywriter. He’s the primary guy who’s pulling together our show notes after every episode. If you don’t know it, every episode of the Pipeliners Podcast has both show notes and a full transcript. One of the reasons we do that is we know that people use this content to train, inform, and educate.

We’ve set it up to be a resource to the industry. That’s been the intent since we started it. James is the guy that puts together the show notes, which links to resources. Not a pipeliner, not an engineer, but he decodes all the complex language that we do and builds all the dictionary stuff out, does a great job.

Terri Hoffman and her team at Marketing Refresh help us with the website and pushing out notifications through LinkedIn. We send a monthly newsletter out to only those people who subscribe. It’s got a digest of all the episodes in the previous month.

Really helpful to me is C.K. Krause. C.K. joined me about a year and a half ago when it was getting to the point that running the podcast, finding the guests, and dealing with all the logistics was becoming too much of a burden. She came on the team and helped organize all that, streamline it, and handle a whole bunch of the details.

For those that are interested in being guests or sponsors, oftentimes, you’re going to be working with C.K., as she helps me maximize my calendar and all of that. There are others involved. Those are the biggies. Thanks to everybody, really important to have them to help put this all together.

In the last year, we’ve covered a lot of ground, covered a lot of subjects, as we always do, but there are a couple things that are rather notable. Everybody, at this point, is familiar with the Colonial cyber incident that happened midyear in 2021. We did a special episode a handful of days after that hit the press. I did it with Clint Bodungen and Pascal Ackerman.

They were really helpful in being responsive. I thought it was important to try and quickly get information out to the industry and help people learn. That episode’s been downloaded a bunch, so I’m certain it’s been helpful to a lot of folks. Still valuable today if you want to know what the incident was and how it was addressed. I recommend you go there and listen to that.

We did a couple of episodes this last year with Keith Coyle on the Gas Gathering Rule. That was Episode 179 and Episode 207. The Gas Gathering Rule grabs up several hundred thousand miles of pipeline and includes them as regulated pipeline going forward, something that a lot of people were interested in. It was written into law late this year. Episode 207 addresses all the details of all of that.

Really enjoyed Q1 of 2021. American Petroleum Institute was our sponsor. We covered a lot of topics with them, but my favorite part was we got to cover several of the new standards or revised standards. We got to do that with the people who were involved in authoring those standards.

I don’t know about you, but oftentimes when I sit down to read a standard, particularly a standard that I’m not familiar with or in a domain that’s outside of my core expertise, I can find it a real challenge to understand what they’re getting at. That was really helpful. API, thank you very much.

They’re going to be sponsoring again in 2022. They’ll be sponsoring in the second quarter, and we’re going to be covering a bunch more standards that are being revised and coming out from API. They’re very active. There’s a lot going on in that domain.

Throughout the year, we did quite a few episodes with quite a few people on various aspects of Pipeline Safety Management. I would encourage you to search SMS or Pipeline Safety Management on the Pipeliners Podcast website. You’ll find all those episodes, lots of great content there. Encourage you to listen to those.

For 2022, we’ve got more coming up. Babst Calland will be sponsoring again as an underwriting sponsor. Keith’s going to be coming on. We’ll continue to talk about regulator rulemakings as they come out. There was a recent one that we haven’t talked about on the podcast yet related to the Great Lakes and coastal waters that impact a lot of people.

We have a new sponsor for the first quarter of this year, EnerACT Energy Services. Please go to the website and check them out, find out what they do.

Burns & McDonnell is going to be sponsoring again in Q3. We haven’t nailed down what our topics will be, but I’m sure they’ll be good. Burns & McDonell is an engineering firm, and they’ve got lots of talented and knowledgeable folks on staff. We covered a lot of interesting things last time around horizontal drilling, geotechnical management, and so forth. I’m sure we’ll have a lot of other interesting topics there as well.

If you don’t know this, at the Pipeliners Podcast website, there’s a section called Resources. We load up definitions of terms and acronyms. We load up white papers and links to resources. Babst Calland provides is regulatory updates, and their regulatory updates are all available in the resources section of the Pipeliners Podcast website. There’s a lot of information there that you might find of use. I encourage you to go to the website and check it out.

Lastly, we are adding a new podcast. You may not be aware of this, but there are two, soon to be three, podcasts on the Pipeliners Podcast website. Currently, there’s the Pipeliners Podcast, and then there’s the Pipeline Technology Podcast.

The Pipeline Technology Podcast is a collaboration between the Pipeliners Podcast and Pipeline & Gas Journal. Once a month, we interview an author of one of the technical articles. Like I was saying a little bit earlier about the API standards, I don’t know about you, but sometimes I read these technical articles, and if they’re in an area I’m not familiar with, they can be a bit challenging to understand.

We’ve started having authors come on and let them unpack and let me ask them simple questions, if you will, to try and understand what they’re writing about. That’s been very well received.

We’re adding the new Oil & Gas Measurement Podcast. That will start later in the month of January. Look for that to come out in the Pipeliners Podcast website. Also, look for announcements on LinkedIn. You can follow me on LinkedIn. If you follow me on LinkedIn, you’ll see all that kind of stuff.

I’ve been wanting to do a podcast on oil and gas measurement for quite some time. I haven’t done it because, frankly, I didn’t have the bandwidth. Weldon Wright, who is the general manager for Gas Certification Institute, was volunteered, eagerly accepted such a volunteering, and is now the host of the Oil & Gas Measurement Podcast. He’s already got a few recorded. They’re being produced, and they’re going to be released shortly. Be looking for that, particularly those of you who work in measurement. It ought to be great.

Lastly, I want to make a request. You might think I know a lot of people and that it’s easy for me to find guests, but it’s often a challenge to find guests, particularly to find guests that have something that’s important and useful to the audience.

I know there’s a lot of people out there. I think people sometimes maybe get a little intimidated about being on the podcast. I will tell you that if you think you have information or topics you’d like to share or know people, I very much would appreciate it if you would reach out.

You can reach out on the website and drop a note on the Contact Us page. I see all of those and respond to them all. Or, you could reach out to me on LinkedIn and drop me a message. I monitor that, respond to all of that as well.

Always looking for guests. In particular, very interested in talking about accident investigations, lessons learned, NTSB reports, incidents, all that kind of stuff. Those can be tough topics to talk about but, done the right way, they’re extremely valuable to the industry. We’re all looking to learn from one another. If you’ve got topics in that domain, we’d be very interested.

I’d like to be able to talk more about SMS, particularly with people who are implementing, try to get some implementation stories. Damage prevention, construction, inspection, recordkeeping, and anything that you’d be interested in learning about that you think could be helpful for pipeliners to hear about. I’d appreciate it if you’d reach out to me and let me know.

To wrap this all up, let me say to all the listeners, thank you. I appreciate you. I hope you find this of value. We’re going to continue to try and improve the quality of the content and make sure that content’s getting put up on the website and put together in a way that people can use it for training, orientation, information, and so forth. I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode and the conversation.

A reminder before we wrap up, you should go and register to win our customized Pipeliners Podcast YETI tumbler. If you haven’t seen pictures of this or if you’re not aware of it, it is a nice 42-ounce stainless steel YETI tumbler emblazoned with the Pipeliners Podcast logo. All you have to do to win it is go pipelinerspodcast.com/win and enter yourself in the drawing.

If you’d like to support the podcast, the best way to do that is to leave us a review. You can do that on Apple Podcast, Google Play, Stitcher, SoundCloud. Wherever you happen to go to listen, just leave us a review.

[background music]

Russel: If you have ideas, questions, or topics you’d be interested in, please let me know on the Contact Us page at pipelinerspodcast.com or reach out to me on LinkedIn.  Thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you next week.

[music]

Transcription by CastingWords

Categories: Pipeliners Podcast, Russel Treat

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