In this episode of the Pipeline Technology Podcast, host Russel Treat discusses the API 1187 Pipeline Integrity Management of Landslide Hazards recommended practice with guests Mark Piazza from API and Andy Duncan from Enbridge.

The conversation explores the historical significance of landslides as a threat to pipelines, the challenges of managing these hazards, and the industry’s ongoing efforts to improve landslide detection, prevention, and mitigation practices through advancements in technology and standards.

API 1187, The Need for a Landslide Hazard Standard Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms

• Mark Piazza is the Senior Policy Advisor at API. Connect with Mark on LinkedIn.
  • API (American Petroleum Institute) represents all segments of America’s natural gas and oil industry. API has developed more than 700 standards to enhance operational and environmental safety, efficiency, and sustainability. 
• Andy Duncan is the Manager for Pipeline Integrity Engineering at Enbridge. Connect with Andy on LinkedIn.
  • Enbridge is a leading North American energy delivery company, focused on providing secure, reliable, and affordable energy through four core businesses: liquids pipelines, natural gas pipelines, gas utilities and storage, and renewable energy.
• The PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle) is embedded in Pipeline SMS (API RP 1173) as a continuous quality improvement model consisting of a logical sequence of four repetitive steps for continuous improvement and learning.
• Geohazards, or geological hazards, are the result of natural, active geologic processes which may include landslides, soil erosion, karst phenomena, and river migration.
• The PRCI (Pipeline Research Council International) is the preeminent global collaborative research development organization of, by, and for the energy pipeline industry.
• Pipeline SMS (Pipeline Safety Management Systems) or PSMS is an industry-wide focus to improve pipeline safety, driving toward zero incidents.
  • API RP 1187, also known  Landslide Integrity Management for Pipeline, is a recommended practice from the American Petroleum Institute that focuses on geohazards and pipeline integrity management.
• Process Safety Management (PSM) refers to a set of interrelated approaches to managing hazards associated with the process industries and is intended to reduce the frequency and severity of incidents resulting from releases of chemicals and other energy sources.
• PHMSA (Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration) is 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.

API 1187, The Need for a Landslide Hazard Standard Full Episode Transcript

[background music]

Announcer: The “Pipeline Technology Podcast,” brought to you by “Pipeline & Gas Journal,” the decision-making resource for pipeline and midstream professionals. Now your host, Russel Treat.

Russel Treat: Welcome to the Pipeline Technology Podcast, episode 15. On this episode, our guests are Mark Piazza with API and Andy Duncan with Enbridge. We’re going to talk to Mark and Andy about the need for the API 1187 Pipeline Integrity Management of Landslide Hazards recommended practice. Mark, Andy, welcome to the Pipeline Technology Podcast.

Mark Piazza: Thank you, Russel. Always a pleasure to be on your show and share knowledge and information.

Andy Duncan: Thanks very much for having us.

Russel: I’d like you guys to do some introductions. Mark, I’m going to ask you to go first because you’ve been here. You know how to do this. We’ll model for Andy how to do a really great introduction, so no pressure.

Mark: No pressure at all. I’ll do the best modeling I can. Mark Piazza with API. I’m a Senior Policy Advisor in our midstream group focusing on pipeline issues, pipeline safety, pipeline integrity management and really helping support the development of standards through API’s programs.

I’ve been at API for three years now. Prior to that, worked at Colonial Pipeline for eight years and Pipeline Research Council International for seven. A long and illustrious career in the pipeline world and loving every minute of it.

Russel: There you go. Great job. Well done. Andy, go ahead. You’re next.

Andy: Thank you very much. Andy Duncan. I’m the Pipeline Integrity Engineering Manager in the Liquids Pipeline division of Enbridge. I’ve been in this role about three years. Prior to that, I was involved for about 10 years in pipeline construction in our Major Projects Group.

My background is welding engineering, metallurgical engineering. Prior to Enbridge, worked for about 10 years with various heavy industrial contractors building piping, pressure vessels, heat exchangers, and the like, largely for the Canadian oil sands, for the product that we put through the pipelines now.

Russel: Great. I asked you guys to come on and talk about some of the work that’s going on in the industry around landslides and landslide threats. Probably the best thing to do is to set a little context and just ask this general question of, what’s been the history of landslides as a threat?

What kinds of things have been occurring and over what timeframe have we begun to become sensitized to landslides?

Andy: Maybe I’ll take that and look at it maybe from a bigger, broader picture. A lot of the time we think about pipelines, we think about corrosion, we think about cracking, and we think about mechanical damage from third parties, denting and the like.

The reality is landslides have been a threat for pipelines since their inception. Ever since we’ve put them into the ground, landslides have posed a threat and have been something that we’ve needed to address.

What’s maybe changed for us or has brought them more to the forefront is, as we’ve moved to higher-strength steels, higher-strength pipelines, and going through some more aggressive terrains, we’re seeing some of the limits being reached, depending on how they were designed and installed and then operated.

We’re seeing more interacting threats on the pipelines due to landslides and that’s drawing some of the attention to landslide management, to the integrity space.

Russel: I know, at least from my experience and some other conversations I’ve had through doing this podcast is there’s been a particular attention in the Marcellus and Utica. For anybody who’s not been in that terrain, it’s very hilly. A lot of those hills, they’re 2,000, 3,000 feet tops, but they’re very steep. There’s a lot of rain in that area.

There’s been a lot of recent development the last 20 years in that area. There’s been a lot of, I would say, probably more well-publicized landslide events in that area than there have been prior. The other thing about the Marcellus that’s also true is they’re moving a lot of liquids, a lot of natural gas liquids and the gathering pipelines there are larger and higher-pressure.

These incidents, when they have occurred, have been more…I’m looking for a word to use. Maybe you guys can help me. They make better pictures for the news cameras is maybe the way to say that.

Andy: Right. They’re often a higher consequence compared to small-diameter, low-pressure lines. That geography is exactly what we’re really focused on. People often naturally think about landslides and they think of the Rocky Mountains.

They go to these enormous slopes, enormous mountains and think that’s the real threat. They are, but any slope, especially, you mentioned steep, wet, and then disturbed and that’s when you put a pipeline in. That terrain, a lot of slopes that go through the area and it creates so many opportunities for a single failure to happen. It only takes one slope to move.

Mark: I would add, Russel, to what Andy’s stated. The term “landslide,” another way to think of it is ground movement. It doesn’t have to be a significant event where you’ve got this giant mass of land, as Andy just mentioned, with like the Rocky Mountains heading towards a pipeline. Ground movement can happen on a small scale as well.

We really want to have the appropriate threat assessment on pipeline systems and the appropriate design parameters for all types of conditions where ground movement is a potential.

Russel: That’s a good point, Mark. I also think it’s interesting too, if you understand anything about ground movement and how that works, you get into all these conversations about soils. The primary thing that affects soils is water, rainfall, and then the soil type. Sand is different than clay is different than rocky.

One of the things that’s really interesting about particularly the Marcellus and the Utica is there’s a lot of variation in soil types there. Andy used the example of the Rocky Mountains. There’s not a lot of variation there. That soil is relatively stable, versus what you find in the Marcellus is it’s relatively unstable, particularly when there’s a lot of water moving.

That’s what makes the nature of the threat and the need for addressing that particular threat can become paramount, at least talking as a non-integrity guy.

Andy: Agreed, 100 percent. The amount of time we spend talking about water management, dewatering slopes, and controlling what the soil is like so that we have an understanding of how it could behave, that’s a real driver here, is when you get that variability that you described, the north slope could be different than the south slope. Understanding that and designing and managing appropriately.

Mark: There’s, I would say, across the industry, with the events that have occurred recently in that Utica/Marcellus conversation we just had, the recognition that data that needs to be collected, looking at publicly available sources of information like rainfall data. We’ve all gotten smarter and are using the tools out there that are available to us.

It’s an interesting story for me. Prior to being in the pipeline world, I was in the environmental community and did a lot of site characterizations and geotechnical investigations.

Wasn’t sure I would ever see those again when I came into the pipeline industry, but now here I am, going back to all those things that I did many, many years ago and understanding the importance of it and soil characterization, how important that is in some of the things that we’ve been talking about with regard to ground movement.

Russel: It’s interesting as an engineer. I’m similarly disposed. My education is civil/structural, but I went into the Air Force. Civil/structural, you think you’re going to build things that go upwards. I was in the Air Force. They don’t do a lot of that. They build things that run along the ground.

If you’re dealing with pavements, if you’re trying to get survivability and long-term use, it’s all about how you manage the water. First, you got to design for the load, but the reliability and long-term use is all about how you manage the water. That’s very much true in this situation as well.

The other thing, if you’re not working around the mechanical aspects of a pipeline, what you don’t realize is even a pipeline in soil is a dynamic thing. It’s not moving a lot, but it’s moving all the time.

Metal is expanding and contracting because of temperature change. You’ve got the soil expanding and contracting and moving because of moisture and drying cycles. There’s just a lot going on there that has impacts on the mechanical integrity of the pipeline.

The other thing too about just the science as I understand what we do, we spend a lot of time with tools looking at the pipeline itself. We haven’t spent as much time looking at the environment the pipeline’s in. It just points out we’re learning more about what we need to learn.

Mark: Continuous improvement. Never stop learning.

Andy: Exactly.

Mark: Taking the opportunities from lessons learned and continuing to drive performance improvement across the industry.

Russel: Andy, I wanted you to elaborate on something we talked about off-mic as we were preparing for this episode and that was the idea of changes without improvement. Can you talk to that a little bit, elaborate what you meant by that term?

Andy: Yeah. I think a big picture. I want to make sure this is a very broad statement, as opposed to focused in any one location or to one operator or anything of the like, but that we’ve seen a fairly stable performance in our performance around the safety around landslides.

We’re experiencing, and have for decades, these events, but we’re still trying to learn and actually improve the performance across the industry. We see PHMSA data, we see some CER data out of Canada that shows we continue to have pipeline safety incidents that are driven by landslides.

There’s been a real push, certainly in the last, I’m going to say, about five years, to demonstrate and actually achieve enhanced performance in the area around landslides. That’s where the work has gone recently to really take those learnings and turn them into something that everybody can use.

As much as I like continuous improvement and sharing sessions, it would be really nice to hear fewer presentations on landslide failures and hear more presentations on integrity management about landslides and how incidents are being prevented going forward.

Russel: That’s really interesting. One of the things too is that, and this is true in any industry, but as you move through time and as technology and understanding evolve, you focus on those threats where you can have the most impact.

I’m going to make a declarative statement. You guys might not agree with this. I would say that when you come to the inline inspection tools and the things we do to look for metal loss and cracking and all that kind of stuff, we’re right at the edge of what the technology is capable of.

We’re struggling, as an industry, with all the data that it’s providing, but we’re not having a lot of issues in the industry with that threat. That threat’s pretty well-managed, versus the whole area of landslide. Mark’s comment about ground movement is right on point. We don’t have nearly the same level of understanding.

We don’t have really a lot in the way of advanced technology that allows us to monitor that and mitigate and manage that risk well or as well, probably a better way to say it. That goes to why there’s a need for a standard.

I’ll make one other comment. I’d like you guys to respond to it. My experience working in soils, being a structural engineer, when you think about the metal, the metal is something we have a fairly large amount of control over that process.

We have a lot less control over the process related to soils, so there’s a lot higher degree of variability in it. You agree with that assessment? If you do, what does that mean in terms of the challenges for mitigating those kind of risks?

Andy: I largely agree with it. When we talk about corrosion, cracking, where we get into a differentiation that’s important for landslides is we have a very, very deep understanding of the time-dependent nature of cracking and corrosion and metal loss, so we can predict.

We can say, “I understand how the corrosion is happening here and I can predict the life that I expect to get out of the asset.”

Where we deviate and when we get into landslides in particular is, it’s really not a time-dependent threat, it’s an event. You mentioned rainfall and water in the soils early on. We have a threat that may exist in a thousand slopes in the Utica, but only one of them is going to move. We don’t know which one and we don’t know when.

We have to really focus on predicting and learning how to predict and be accurate on when that’s going to happen. That, to me, is where the difference comes. We know why it happens. We know what the failure mechanisms are, but it’s not the same time-dependent threat that we see in metal loss and cracking.

Russel: Andy, that’s an excellent comment. It’s causing my head to spin a little bit because it really gets to the core issue, the core challenge, and drives at the need for the standard. When I was doing work in geotechnical, which has been a long time ago, the kinds of things that we would do is we would measure movement and we would inspect the ground.

What we never did is we never looked at, what level of rainfall of this location would…? The event is driven by external factors. It’s, what are those key external factors and how do you measure those things and then use that as a predictive mechanism? I think that’s what you’re driving at. It’s causing my head to spin a little bit because that’s a very complex problem.

Mark: Looking at being able to predict a ground movement issue, very difficult. I don’t disagree with that. You develop a monitoring program. You gather the data that you think you need to help you understand the characteristics around the pipeline.

I don’t disagree that cracking and corrosion, yes, the predictive aspects of that are there, better established than we have currently for ground movement issues. Certainly, opportunities are there.

Back to continuous improvement again, we do continue to push the envelope with research projects that are being done, working with, again, these publicly available databases. A lot of universities are doing work in this area.

It will be more difficult to predict, but hopefully, we continue to move in the direction of utilizing some of the tools and capabilities that things like AI and machine learning provide for us now and can help us at least understand when something might happen, even though we can’t firmly predict when it will happen.

Russel: There’s also probably opportunities to look at research in other areas and determine how it applies. The universities have done a ton of research around erosion. Erosion and ground movement, they’re cousins.

They’re not the same thing. They’re not the same mechanism, but there’s a lot of similarities, a lot of learnings to be found in all of that. Again, that’s a really interesting point, Mark.

Mark: It’s something that is front and center. As Andy mentioned, it’s in front of the industry. We do want to have fewer incidents and hopefully working towards developing standardization in the processes and giving operators the tools to be able to do P&M measures, preventive and mitigative measures, to help better manage some of those ground movement conditions along the pipeline.

Russel: What kind of regulatory framework is around this issue? What kind of guidance? Where is PHMSA with regards to its understanding and regulation of ground movement?

Mark: Andy, I’ll let you take that first.

Russel: [laughs]

Andy: I was really hoping you would, Mark.

Mark: [laughs]

Andy: PHMSA has a good understanding. They understand the threat that’s out there. Really, their primary focus is public safety. There have been incidents recently that really compromised public safety and it’s important for them.

It’s a high-profile topic that they want to see progress on, they want to see action on. Right now, it’s not a prescriptive requirement in terms of how each operator will address landslides.

That’s one of the things we’re trying to get here with API 1187, is to really get a little bit more of a guidance for the industry, a collection of the best practices, so that we don’t end up with PHMSA taking us down one road when any of the three roads would be acceptable and get us to the same destination.

I always think about it as we would like PHMSA to regulate and mandate an outcome. As an industry and as individual operators, we can set the details of exactly how we’ll get there but achieve that level of safety that is expected by the regulator and by the public, frankly.

Russel: Would it be correct to say that the current state is there’s no direct guidance, but it is a threat that the regulators are aware of and are asking questions about?

Mark: Yeah.

Andy: Go ahead.

Mark: I’m sorry. PHMSA has issued two advisory bulletins. As Andy said, it’s a topic of interest, front and center in PHMSA’s head. They are focusing on reminding operators that these advisory bulletins are really just a notification to say, “Make sure you’re managing your geohazard threats. Make sure you understand our expectations.”

Andy hit it on the head. There’s no prescriptive requirement. There are general statements in both the natural gas and hazardous liquid regulatory code that says, “You will not operate unsafely,” at a very high level.

Russel: There’s due care provisions.

Mark: Yes. The weather and outside force has been one of original nine threats in B31.8. That’s been out there for a while too. As we’ve talked about, we’re fully aware that this threat exists. From the regulatory perspective, it is on the operators, as Andy stated, to develop a program to manage that threat and ensure that we don’t have safety incidents.

Russel: Prior to 1187, what’s been out there that the operators have used for guidance?

Mark: I would say there’s a lot of past PRCI reports and documents that have been published, that deal with geohazard ground movement, how to manage it, even some P&M approaches to take. That’s been the primary, from my understanding. I’ll let Andy speak next from the operator side.

Those reports were typically what I used and referenced, working in the integrity management realm. There may be an ISO standard out there that’s available to operators as well and could be others that I’m just not familiar with. Those are the primary tools that have been available to the operating community for several years, many years.

Andy: It’s been a collection of industry research, operator sharings, incident investigations that have guided the how, trying to collect those learnings and industry groups that have got together to try to define a little bit and share those best practices of “You don’t need to invent it on your own. Here’s what each of us is learning. Let’s share so that we can all operate more safely.”

[crosstalk]

Mark: Sorry, Russel. As we come up on the 2024 International Pipeline Conference — that’s in a week or so — that’s a primary mechanism as well for sharing that information. There’s a lot of technical papers, a lot of literature that’s cited in supporting development of ground movement programs.

Andy: I heard there’s nine sessions and 27 papers on landslides [inaudible 24:26] .

Russel: This is a great tee-up. I’m teasing out our second part of this episode a little bit. What you’re pointing at is, what’s the need for a standard?

The biggest challenge for any engineer, particularly working in the integrity management domain, is understanding how to navigate the immense volume of technical material that’s out there and understand, out of all these reports and all this information and all the tools that come out of that, which one do I pick for my situation? [laughs]

That is very much a non-trivial challenge. It’s very much a non-trivial challenge. It drives at the need for a standard.

Andy: I might sum it up that, why do we need the standard? You have really well-intentioned people who are trying their best to create an effective program. There’s so much information out there, as you mentioned, that it is really hard to reflect on your own program and understand, how do you benchmark against industry?

An API-recommended practice gives you something to measure against, to set some expectations, to point you in the right direction to resources that can help you build or assess your own program depending on the maturity level of your company. It really sets something for everybody to look at and say, “Here’s a measuring stick with help to…”

[crosstalk]

Russel: It lays out a path. It lays out a process. It lays out a path. You’re not figuring that out from scratch, right?

Andy: Correct.

Russel: That’s a huge, huge deal. That’s a great place to end this episode. For the listeners that have listened to this and want to hear the second part, we’re doing something unusual here, or unique, because we haven’t done it before.

This is the first of a two-part episode, part one being The Need for a Standard, which we’ve been talking about up till now. We’re doing this on the Pipeline Technology Podcast.

[background music]

Russel: Part two is on the “Pipeliner’s Podcast.” I would encourage you to find and listen to that episode as well. Thank you, gentlemen.

Andy: Thanks very much.

Mark: Yeah.

Russel: I hope you enjoyed this month’s episode of the Pipeline Technology Podcast and our conversation with Mark and Andy. If you’d like to support the podcast, please leave us a review. You can do that wherever you listen. You can find instructions at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com.

If there’s a Pipeline & Gas Journal article where you’d like to hear from the author, please let me know on the Contact Us page at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com, or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you next month.