This week’s Pipeliners Podcast episode features Claudia Farrell of Burns & McDonnell discussing the key factors that go into pipeline routing, permitting, and pre-construction planning.

In this episode, you will learn about the processes and planning involved in building a pipeline, typical situations that affect pipeline routing, and the complexity around the pipeline permitting process. You will also learn about what can make the pre-construction process successful versus unsuccessful.

Pipeline Pre-Construction: Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms

• Claudia Farrell is a senior project engineer for pipeline design and construction projects at Burns & McDonnell. Connect with Claudia on LinkedIn.
  • Burns & McDonnell is a family of companies bringing together an unmatched team of 7,600 engineers, construction professionals, architects, planners, technologists and scientists to help those who work in critical infrastructure sectors deliver on their imperative responsibilities.
    • Listen to this month’s Pipeliners Podcast episodes sponsored by Burns & McDonnell.
    • Access this Burns & McDonnell white paper on the FERC Permitting Process, “Overcoming Common Challenges With the FERC Permitting Process.”
    • Access this Burns & McDonnell project profile, “Develop a New Path Toward Reliability Goals.”
• Pipeline Stringing is the delivery and aligning of the pipe joints along the side of the pipeline trench ready to be welded and tested before being lowered into the trench.
• Pipeline Permitting is the process of applying for permission to install a pipeline over a certain area of land.
  • Episode 85: Tom Magness discussed pipeline permitting from a Corps of Engineers’ perspective.
• INGAA (Interstate Natural Gas Association of America) is a trade organization that advocates regulatory and legislative positions of importance to the natural gas pipeline industry in North America.
  • Construction Safety Guidelines were developed to help ensure safety in natural gas pipeline construction activities. 
• FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) is the United States federal agency that regulates the transmission and wholesale sale of electricity and natural gas in interstate commerce and regulates the transportation of oil by pipeline in interstate commerce.
  • Access FERC processes for pipeline permitting that apply to both natural gas and LNG.
• Google Earth is a computer program that renders a 3D representation of Earth based primarily on satellite imagery. The program maps the Earth by superimposing satellite images, aerial photography, and GIS data onto a 3D globe, allowing users to see cities and landscapes from various angles
• GIS (Geographic Information System) is a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present spatial or geographic data.
• United States Fish and Wildlife Service is an agency of the U.S. federal government within the U.S. Department of the Interior dedicated to the management of fish, wildlife, and natural habitats.
  • National Wetlands Inventory for reference.
• PHMSA (Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration) ensures the safe transportation of energy and hazardous materials.
  • The National Pipeline Mapping System (NPMS) contains data on the locations of gas transmission, hazardous liquid pipelines, and LNG plants that are under federal jurisdiction.

Pipeline Pre-Construction: Full Episode Transcript

Russel Treat:  Welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast, episode 142, sponsored by Burns & McDonnell, delivering pipeline projects with an integrated construction and design mindset, connecting all the project elements, design, procurement, sequencing at the site. Burns & McDonnell uses its vast knowledge and the latest technology with an ownership commitment to safely deliver innovative, quality projects. Learn how Burns & McDonnell is on-site through it all at burnsmcd.com.

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

Russel:  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 each episode. This week, our winner is Daniel Bally with ExxonMobil Pipeline. To learn how you can win this signature prize pack, stick around to the end of the episode.

This week, Claudia Farrell with Burns & McDonnell returns to the podcast to talk about routing and permitting. Claudia, welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast.

Claudia Farrell:  Thanks, Russel. Glad to be here.

Russel:  Very glad to have you. I’ve asked you to talk about routing and permitting and planning. These are things that I have a notional understanding about, so I’m excited about learning. Maybe you could start by just introducing yourself. Tell us a little bit about your background; how you got into pipelining.

Claudia:  Certainly. I’m a senior project engineer with Burns & McDonnell. I’ve been in the oil and gas industry for about eight years now. I got into pipelines following the San Bruno incident. There was a big demand for records research, and I got involved in reading old pipeline drawings. That started me down this path.

Russel:  Does that mean you’re a paperwork engineer?

Claudia:  [laughs] A little bit. I spent a lot of time at a desk.

Russel:  [laughs] I think that’s one of the things that a lot of people don’t understand about pipelining. Particularly, if you’re working with some of the older pipelines and older utilities, there’s still a whole lot of the records that only exist in paper form.

Claudia, maybe a good place to start is just talk from a high level. What is the process from the time that an operator can see they need a pipeline until they’re ready to start doing the construction part of things?

Claudia:  Sure. From an operator standpoint, now you got a new source of natural gas. We’ve got expanding shale gas that’s coming around, and so that’s driving a need for more pipelines to move gas from the field to distribution.

You can also just have a change in demand if you have population growth that you’ve been serving an area with a small diameter pipeline for years and the population’s expanded. You want to make sure that you are providing heating fuel for homes and making sure that you’ve got enough supply going to an area.

I think there’s also just the import-export potential, now as gas moves around the world, making sure that you’ve got natural gas flowing to the places where it’s needed.

Russel:  Right. The whole process really starts with what’s the market, and where’s the market?

Claudia:  That is very true.

Russel:  Yeah, I think that’s probably not often understood. [laughs] It would seem self-evident, but it’s not often understood.

Claudia:  Right. We worked on a project about a year or two ago where there was an area that was being served by a six-inch diameter pipeline, which is relatively small. It was at the end of the system, and it was getting older.

They realized that there wasn’t any redundancy to the area, so they wanted to build a new, larger pipeline to be able to provide a redundant source of gas. If they needed to do maintenance on the older line, they had the ability to take it down without cutting off this region from natural gas.

Russel:  Right, yeah. Again, that’s another thing that’s self-evident, is that natural gas, particularly if you’re talking from a utility perspective, their key mission is to keep the gas flowing.

They’ve got to serve. They don’t have a lot of control over the demand. It just is what it is. If it’s cold, they’ve got to heat homes. If it’s hot, they’ve got to run the power plants and turn the air conditioners, all that kind of stuff. Cool. Once you have an understanding of what you need to do as a project, where do things go from there?

Claudia:  Once the need has been determined, next we’re trying to figure out how do we get from point A to point B?

You’ve got a source of gas, be it another facility or straight coming out of the ground. You’ve got wells. Now you need to find a path to get that gas from where it is to where it needs to be, and routing is a major part of our design phase for pipelines.

Russel:  This is going to display my level of ignorance in this domain, but why is routing a big deal? Why don’t I just draw a straight line from where the gas is and where I want it to go, and that’s where the pipeline goes?

Claudia:  That’s what I would love to do, Russel, is just to be able to draw a straight line and connect the two dots.

What happens is you’ve got towns, or you have sensitive environmental areas. You’ve got landowner considerations. You want to make sure that you have a route that can be acquired and can be constructed. That routing goes hand-in-hand with permitting and with right-of-way.

You’ve got all of your interested parties who are going back and forth and talking to each other about, “We’ve got this large wetland that we’d like to avoid, so let’s route around the wetland,” or, “This is a heavily forested area, and they’ve got some sensitive trees. We want to try to avoid those to the best of our ability and minimize impacts there.”

You start with your straight line, and then you start putting your little deviations in to make sure that you’ve avoided what you need to avoid, but you’re still accomplishing the goal of getting from point A to point B.

Russel:  I understand environmental and population density and such. That to me is straightforward. What are some of the things, from a constructability standpoint, that might drive routing?

Claudia:  Oftentimes, you have to cross roads, or you have to cross large water bodies. You want to make sure that you’re providing a route that’s got sufficient workspace in order to set up all of your equipments and do some sort of trenchless installation that goes under those different parts.

Russel:  Yeah. Just when you say that, when you just say, “I’ve got to have enough room to actually put the equipment in place to string and lay the line,” that by itself, it could be quite constraining, depending on just the geography you’re in.

Claudia:  A lot of times, pipe stringing is forgotten, it comes out as secondary. We’ll see areas where maybe the owner has thought through the process a little bit and started to think about what their workspaces will look like. Where they’ve set up their drill exit point — where you’d want to have your pipe strong — there’s a major highway 300 feet away.

You just can’t string across a highway, so you’ve got to start looking at where you’ve got the space to lay out some straight pipe to build and pull it back through your drill.

Russel:  You also got the issue of width, too, because I’ve got to have enough room to dig the trench, all the dirt, string the pipe, run the equipment, run the crews up and down, all of that. I’ve got a certain level of width that I need as well.

Claudia:  There are some published guidelines on what a construction workspace width should look like. I know that INGAA has produced some documents on that, that given a pipe of this diameter, you’re going to need this much permanent easement to be able to install and maintain the pipeline, and this much temporary workspace to be able to move your equipment around.

Russel:  I’ll make a note here that we’ll link some of these documents up that you’re referring to. If somebody’s listening to the episode and wants to go dig them off the website, they have the ability to do that.

Claudia:  Absolutely.

Russel:  We talked a little bit about routing. What about permitting? Because through some of the things I’ve been doing the last couple, three years, I’ve had some tangential exposure to what the permitting process is all about, and, man, is it complex.

Claudia:  Permitting is a complex part of pipeline design. I think there’s a lot more public opinion on pipelines right now. I don’t want to get terribly political here, but you could see a lot of these national pipelines right now are running into permitting issues.

It’s a give or take between the company and the public, and how we can safely design and construct pipelines so that they’re not impacting people or animals or trees, or whoever’s around.

Russel:  I’ll have to look it up. I’ll make sure it lands in the show notes, but we did a previous episode with someone who was a colonel in the Corps of Engineers [Episode 85: Tom Magness] and had run permitting offices.

It was really interesting, because one of the things he said is that the role is to permit because these things are necessary for the economy and for various things. The role is to permit.

I think that gets lost sometime is that the process is about permitting this activity to occur, not prohibiting the activity from occurring.

Claudia:  The permitting process is important because it is making sure that you’re permitting the work in a way that’s correct, accurate, and safe.

Russel:  I would say also, Claudia, that the thing about the permitting process is it gives an opportunity for all the stakeholders to put their input into the process. That’s the important part of it, because you can’t do your design and take all those things in consideration unless you know what they are.

Claudia:  It’s very true.

Russel:  Once you get through the permitting process, what’s the next part of what you’re doing?

Claudia:  Once you’ve determined that you’ve got all of your permit set up, and that you’ve basically come to the point that your preliminary design is acceptable, it’s been permitted, you can work on your final design.

That’s really clearing up any changes that came up as part of the permitting process, doing your reviews to make sure that all of your documents can be bid from.

I think that’s an important step, is to make sure that you’re communicating information correctly and completely with a construction contractor so they understand what the intent was.

Russel:  Yeah. That brings you to the next part that you have to do before you actually start moving dirt is you’ve got to do your construction planning.

Claudia:  Correct.

Russel:  Again, that’s probably way more complex than what anybody who doesn’t do that realizes.

Claudia:  There’s a lot of planning that goes into this process.

Russel:  To what degree does this bid of executing a pipeline construction project…to what degree is it driven by the planning?

Claudia:  A lot of the speed right now, currently, is driven by the permitting process, the amount of time that it takes different agencies to review the drawings. That can vary from anywhere from two weeks with maybe a local jurisdiction to a year, if you’re working on an interstate project or something that has to be permitted through FERC. That’s a long process.

A lot of times what will happen is we may do some work on the early preliminary permitting side. Our role as design engineers goes on hold for a year, while we get through the permitting process. Once the permits have been acquired, then we’re back on the job to finalize the design.

Russel:  I’m going to try to restate a little bit about the process. There’s a market analysis. There’s a routing. There’s a permitting. There’s a design, and then there’s construction planning.

It makes me wonder how iterative is that process. How often are you backing up and redoing something you’ve already worked through based on what’s going on in the process, what I’m learning, or what I’m needing to change?

Claudia:  Russel, I would say that depends.

Russel:  [laughs] What does it depend on, Claudia?

Claudia:  A lot of times, it’s the scale and the scope of the project. If you have a relatively short pipeline, less than 20 miles, that’s just going between two towns or through a town, that may be a shorter process than an interstate pipeline that’s 500 miles long.

That’s going to be a very iterative process as you go through different landowner agreements. You go through different permitting procedures. You do additional survey work.

We’ve got boots on the ground. Things that you may not have known about from your desktop review or coming up now, and suddenly there’s a river that wasn’t showing up on Google Earth anywhere.

Russel:  Yeah, or a watershed that nobody knew was a watershed, that kind of thing.

Claudia:  That can happen.

Russel:  Yes, it can. [laughs]

Claudia:  I would also say that the iterative process is much easier when we’re going through more rural areas than urban areas. When you have an urban pipeline, that process can be very repetitive.

Russel:  Yeah, that’s largely about the number of jurisdictions you go through. I actually own a piece of property that falls under, I think, four different jurisdictions.

We actually have a county line running through the property, so it’s got a city jurisdiction and two county jurisdictions, and then some other jurisdictions beyond that. It’s just nuts sometimes.

Claudia:  [laughs] Yes. The action to find all of those jurisdictions and make sure that you’re talking to everyone can be quite an undertaking as well.

Russel:  I guess that’s where length really matters, because the longer the pipeline, the more jurisdictions you’re cutting across. You not only have the number but the hierarchy, because you have city, county, state, federal. There’s plenty of big pipelines that are crossing all those jurisdictional boundaries.

Claudia:  That is true.

Russel:  What would you say are the key things that makes this whole pre-construction process successful versus unsuccessful?

Claudia:  There are a couple things that we found are generally more helpful for getting a pipeline design and to construction. I’d say that one of those is public opinion, making sure that you’re doing the public outreach early, that you’re talking about the need for the pipeline.

A lot of times people see a pipeline, and they just assume that it’s only about money. That’s not the case. We’re trying to keep people happy and warm in their homes. That’s an important part, is making sure that you are being upfront and forward and open with the information that you’re sharing with the public.

Russel:  Yeah. That’s probably one of the biggest, because the thing that’s most likely in this day and age to hang you up is the permitting process, I think.

Claudia:  That is a very true statement for current pipeline projects.

Russel:  I’m thinking about this. The market analysis and the initial routing and that kind of stuff is really a desktop exercise. You don’t need to get guys out boots on the ground to do those things.

How much of that kind of work can you get done? I’m trying to understand how much do I do before I go start putting boots on the ground? How do I help boots on the ground be successful?

Claudia:  Well, I’d say that depends.

[laughter]

Russel:  Perfect. What does it depend on?

Claudia:  There’s a lot that can be done from desktop reviews now, especially because there is so much open-sourced information. I mentioned Google Earth. It’s a great tool for preliminary planning, but it’s not perfect.

If you’re trying to do everything from Google Earth, you’ll realize that sometimes the images don’t quite line up.

You may think that your initial design is here, but then when you go out and stake it in the field, it’s 30 feet to the north of where you thought you were. I’d say, tools like Google Earth, there’s a lot of geographical information system, GIS, that has different research layers that people have done.

You can see the National Wetland Inventory Layers, and that’ll give you a rough idea of wetlands that have been mapped in the United States. Fish and Wildlife Service has a lot of information. I think they’re the ones that produce that National Wetlands Inventory. There’s also PHMSA, which hosts the pipeline mapping system. You can look and see where there are other pipelines and utilities in an area.

Oftentimes, it’s easier to permit a project where there’s already a pipeline. That’s one of the tools that we can use to help that process if we’re going to be roughly in the area where there’s other pipelines to go ahead and collocate with those corridors.

Russel:  You drop your pipeline and a right-of-way already exists or make that right-of-way a little wider versus a brand new right-of-way.

Claudia:  Right, and we see that a lot, especially with the pipelines that are providing some redundancy or expanding capacity that an operator already has a 50-foot right-of-way, and they have a six-inch line in it. There’s sufficient space to locate the new pipeline in that.

One of the difficulties with having the existing right-of-way is things change over time. Rivers move. Roads come up. New subdivisions are built. Just because you have an existing easement doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s the best place for your new pipeline.

Russel:  Yeah. There’s probably a whole podcast just on that subject right there. Certainly, I have some exposure to some projects, where on the surface of it, the preliminary analysis online, replacing a pipeline, I’m just going to put the new line in the same right-of-way the old line exists in.

There might be all kinds of those kinds of problems you need to solve and hence you may need to reroute. How long have you been doing this kind of work, Claudia? You said you’ve been in pipelining about eight years now.

Claudia:  Yes.

Russel:  What do you wish that pipeline operators knew that they don’t generally know, in your experience?

Claudia:  A lot of people know a lot more than I do. One of the things that I found that’s been telling in projects that I’ve worked on is a permittable route is not always constructible. A constructible route is not always permittable.

I think there’s a real balance that you have to find between those two tasks with designing a pipeline, is making sure that you can fill both of those qualifiers.

Russel:  I think you need to turn that into a bumper sticker.

[laughter]

Russel:  That’d be awesome. I would put that bumper sticker on my truck. I can get this route permitted, but the reason I get that route permitted is no people want to go there. Because nobody wants to go there, I can’t construct there. It’s economically non-feasible. Likewise, here’s something that would be very easy to construct, but that’s where all the people are.

Claudia:  Or that’s where the blind cave skink lives and you can’t build a pipeline through there.

Russel:  Yeah, exactly. [laughs] I actually think that’s quite a little catchphrase. I like it. How do you reconcile that? If a constructible is not always permittable, and a permittable is not always constructible, how do you reconcile that?

Claudia:  With enough time and effort, any route can be both permittable and constructible, but it may not be the original route that you started your design with.

As we get through the process and we do more research, you get boots on the ground, you delineate your wetlands, you start to find, “Here’s where we can put a pipeline. We have a landowner who’s agreeable we can build through here.”

Russel:  Yes. That’s actually another question I wanted to ask in this domain is, “What do you wish pipeline operators knew about property owners?”

Claudia:  [laughs] Okay. That’s a good question.

Russel:  I got lots of good questions. I don’t have very many good answers, but I got lots of good questions.

Claudia:  Well, I’ll try to come up with an answer for you. I’m not sure that it’s a good one.

There are some landowners who no matter how much money you offer just aren’t going to be amenable to having a pipeline in their backyard. Others, if you do offer them the right price, they’ll agree to it.

I don’t want to pass judgment on who has pipelines in the yards. My last house had a pipeline in the backyard, but I bought the house with the pipeline there. They didn’t have to talk to me about it.

I think it’s something that pipelines are crisscrossing the country, and we want them to be as safe as possible. We want to reduce the number of accidents that happen. We want to make sure that this pipeline is there, and it’s operated safely. The landowner doesn’t have to give it a second thought.

Russel:  I think I would frame that, is we want to be good neighbors, and we want to have good neighbors. That’s really a routing problem, but it’s also not static because property ownership changes.

Claudia:  That is true.

Russel:  It’s complex. Like everything else, it’s a complex problem. The other thing that I’m just notionally curious about in this domain is, to what degree is going out and actually trying to acquire the right-of-way?

Once I get the boots on the ground and start doing the things that need to happen to acquire right-of-ways and so forth, what degree does that stir things up? If it does stir things up, how might I mitigate that?

Claudia:  Well, Russel, as much preliminary research as we can do, before we’re sending right-of-way agents out, is helpful.

Understanding you’ve got a large landowner that maybe you can get two miles of the pipeline installed may be a better option than trying to talk to 20 different landowners about that property on the other side.

If you can find those large tracts of land that will help with the overall land acquisition effort, I think that’s important, especially on the longer jobs, trying to minimize the number of landowners that are impacted.

Russel:  Cool. As I often do on these, I want to try and summarize this, really, for my own benefit. I’m always learning when I’m having these conversations. My takeaway here is that a lot of this work can be done as a desktop planning exercise.

There’s lots of resources that are available to make that more comprehensive, more accurate, more complete. To the extent you can do that upfront.

The other part is going to go better. The challenging part of this process is really the permitting part, getting from my preliminary design to the time I’m ready to stick the shovel in the ground. That’s my key takeaway in this conversation.

Claudia:  I’d agree with that.

Russel:  Great. Listen, Claudia, thank you so much for coming onboard. It’s been great to have you and look forward to getting an opportunity to meet you at one of the trade shows, when we get post COVID where we’re actually able to go out and meet people again.

Claudia:  I look forward to that too, Russel. Thank you.

Russel:  All right. Thanks for being a guest.

Claudia:  Thanks for having me.

Russel:  I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of the Pipeliners Podcast and our conversation with Claudia Farrell.

Just a reminder before you go, you should register to win our customized Pipeliners Podcast YETI tumbler. Simply visit pipelinepodcastnetwork.com/win to enter yourself in the drawing.

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

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