This week’s Pipeliners Podcast episode features first-time guest Matt Brown of Tetra Tech discussing the Pipeline Integrity Management Process with host Russel Treat.

In this episode, you will learn about the key objectives of the entire pipeline integrity process, being able to identify and prioritize pipeline risks based on the likelihood of an incident times the consequence of an incident, the critical nature of data in Integrity Management, what’s next for Integrity Management to continue supporting pipeline safety, and more topics.

Pipeline Integrity Management: Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms

• Matt Brown, PE, PMP is the Asset Integrity Program Lead at Tetra Tech. Connect with Matt on LinkedIn.
• Integrity Management (Pipeline Integrity Management) is a systematic approach to operate and manage pipelines in a safe manner that complies with PHMSA regulations.
• Risk Assessment is defined by PHMSA as the systematic process in which hazards from pipeline operation are identified and the probability and consequences of potential adverse events are analyzed and estimated.
• Cracks in pipeline inspection refer to breaks, splits, flaws, or deformities in the surface of a pipe. Inline inspection tools are used to evaluate the severity of the crack.
• Corrosion in pipeline inspection refers to a type of metal loss anomaly that could indicate the deterioration of a pipe. Inline inspection techniques are used to evaluate the severity of corrosion.
• Geotechnical Hazard (a/k/a geotechnical threats) is any process that takes place on the earth’s surface that can negatively impact the integrity of a pipeline. (e.g. earthquakes, landslides, subsidence, etc.)
  • River Scour is defined as the erosion of a riverbed (vertical scour) or riverbanks (lateral scour) by flowing water. Scour can occur gradually or episodically during floods.
• PHMSA (Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration) ensures the safe transportation of energy and hazardous materials.
  • CFR 192 and 195 provide regulatory guidance on the pipeline transport of natural gas and hazardous liquids, respectively.
    • 195: PHMSA released a new final rule, “Pipeline Safety: Safety of Hazardous Liquid Pipelines,” in October 2019 that became effective on July 1, 2020. In the final rule, PHMSA strengthens the IM requirements to identify and respond to the increased pipeline risks resulting from operational changes, weather and associated geotechnical hazards, and increased use and age of a pipe.
• Integrity Assessment is defined by PHMSA as measurements made by pipeline operators to determine whether their hazardous liquid or natural gas pipelines have adequate strength to prevent leaks or ruptures under normal operation and upset conditions.
• 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.
• Direct Assessment Testing is identified in the PHMSA Gas Pipeline Integrity Management Rule as one of the three acceptable methods for evaluating the integrity of a pipeline segment. Direct Assessment may be used either as a primary or a supplementary method implemented in conjunction with one of the other primary assessment methods (e.g. inline inspection or hydrostatic pressure testing).
  • ECDA (External Corrosion Direct Assessment) is the process of improving pipeline safety by assessing and reducing the impact of external corrosion on pipeline integrity. ECDA serves as a proactive measure of preventing corrosion from affecting the integrity of a pipeline’s structure.
    • The PHMSA Gas Pipeline Integrity Management Rule outlines specific requirements when performing an external corrosion direct assessment.
• Hydrostatic Pressure Testing is used to periodically assess the integrity of hazardous liquid and gas transmission pipelines when the use of inline inspection tools is not reasonable. When neither inline inspection tools nor hydrostatic testing are possible, operators typically conduct integrity assessments using a direct assessment.
  • Listen to Pipeliners Podcast episodes covering Inline Inspection and the various use of tests.
• Integrity Dig Program is a preventative maintenance program that aims to identify risks to people, communities, and the environment by investigating sections of pipe that require repair to prevent leaks or releases.
• (MFL) Magnetic Flux Leakage is a magnetic method of nondestructive testing that is used to detect corrosion and pitting in pipelines.
• SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) is a system of software and technology that allows pipeliners to control processes locally or at remote location. SCADA breaks down into two key functions: supervisory control and data acquisition. Included is managing the field, communication, and control room technology components that send and receive valuable data, allowing users to respond to the data.

Pipeline Integrity Management: Full Episode Transcript

Russel Treat:  Welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast, episode 201, sponsored by EnerSys Corporation, providers of POEMS, the Pipeline Operations Excellence Management System, compliance and operations software for the pipeline control center to address control room management SCADA and audit readiness. Find out more about POEMS at EnerSysCorp.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. Now, your host, Russel Treat.

Russel:  Thanks for listening to the Pipeliners Podcast. I always appreciate your time, and to show that appreciation, we give away a customized Yeti tumbler to one listener each episode. This week, our winner is David Copeland with Navitas Midstream Partners. Congratulations, David, your YETI is on its way. To learn how you can win this signature prize, stick around for the end of the episode.

This week, Matt Brown, Asset Integrity Program Lead at Tetra Tech, is joining us to talk about the pipeline Integrity Management process. Matt, welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast.

Matt Brown:  Hey, Russel. Thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

Russel:  Well, we’re glad to have you. Before we get going, would you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into pipelining?

Matt:  Yeah, sure. First and foremost, I’m an avid Pipeliners Podcast listener. That’s always important! But my background in the industry, I’ve been working in oil and gas, and specifically pipeline and facility integrity, for the last 10-and-a-half years or so.

I got into the industry straight out of school, actually. It was in that 2010-11 timeframe, and the industry was going pretty good, actually, at that time. Naturally found my way into consulting, coming out of an industry school, and found a nice niche in the integrity space. That was my entrance.

Russel:  How did you discover pipelining? How’d you come across that as a career opportunity?

Matt:  I was mechanical engineering in school, so there’s an inherent draw to any type of fluid flow, pumping, hydraulics, that type of world. As I progressed through the career search, and pipeline operations showed itself, it drew me in. It was just fascinating.

You don’t hear a lot about the pipeline industry or the infrastructure until you start looking into it for yourself. It really becomes impressive, once you see the scale of the infrastructure, the assets, and just how the industry operates. It’s invisible. It’s underground. There’s not a lot of organic ways to stumble into it.

Russel:  That’s so very true. I have family up in the Portland, Oregon area, and I was up there visiting. I asked them one time, “Do you guys have pipelines up here?” They’re like, “Oh, no, no, no, we don’t have pipelines.” I said, “Oh, there’s pipelines all up and down the Columbia River.” It’s just they don’t know about them, because they don’t know they’re there. They don’t know what to look for. They’re all underground. You don’t know.

Anyways, look, I asked you to come on and talk about pipeline integrity. We’ve done a lot of episodes on pipeline integrity, and we’ve covered a lot of technical details. I know you’ve listened to a lot of stuff, but you approached me, and I thought you had an interesting idea about how to approach this conversation.

Really, just talk about pipeline integrity from an overview perspective. What’s the entire process? Why don’t I start by asking this question. Really, what’s the key objective of the pipeline integrity process?

Matt:  Yeah, great starting point, Russel. Pipeline integrity, really public safety, that’s first and foremost, and putting together a systematic, comprehensive, and integrated approach to managing safety and integrity of the assets is the objective.

Understanding your assets, understanding the threats they face, understanding how they interact with the environment, the public, site-specific information, and keeping them safe. Safe means keeping product on the inside of the pipe, in a nutshell.

We want to avoid failures. We want to avoid injury, and specifically, protection of life, of people, and the environment in general. That’s the big idea, is not just having that occur by happenstance, but doing it intentionally and with a strategy.

To hit that key objective of public safety, you first start with a risk assessment, prioritize what assets and infrastructure are most important or critical to that. Then you move into an integrity assessment process, which is where you go out, you collect data, you analyze key information and targeted information about your assets based on your threats.

Then you take action. You respond to those results, and you mitigate based on those results. Then you set basically a plan forward with what you know or have learned about that assessment for future inspections, future management.

Then, at the end of the day, the big granddaddy, if you will, is data integration. Taking all those results, combining them together, making them normalized, and tracking that against performance measures. Then it really falls into a cycle of continuous improvement. That’s the big cycle of pipeline integrity.

Russel:  Matt, could you unpack for me a little bit risk assessment?

Matt:  Yeah, the integrity process really starts with a comprehensive risk assessment, Russel. If you were to break that down, that’s really got three components to it.

One, you have to identify the threats that your pipeline faces. That could be things like corrosion, cracking, third-party damage from other companies or contractors that are excavating around your pipeline. Then you look at each of those threats from a consequence perspective, and then a likelihood perspective.

If you look at a risk, if you just look up any generic risk equation, like risk is likelihood times consequence. That’s just what risk is. What’s my chance of failing, and what’s my consequence of failing? That’s inherently, that’s what the risk is.

That sets the table. You look at your pipeline, you look at the threats. Does this treat apply? Yes or no. What’s the consequence of failing at any given point, and then what’s the likelihood that I can fail at that point?

Those are the fundamental pieces that make up a comprehensive risk assessment for a pipeline.

Russel:  I want to unpack this a little bit. If I were to ask you this question, what is the thing that you would say pipeline operators most need to keep their eye on as it relates to the risk assessment?

Matt:  The most challenging part of risk assessment is, in my opinion, updating it. It’s pretty straightforward to put something in place, like on day one, but on day two — maybe it’s year two    on day two — it comes time to update and look at the new information you’ve pulled in over the course of a year. There’s just so much that occurs in that time, and doing a proper review of that to update each of the…

For example, there might be 25 or 30 threats, and each of those have a variety of criteria, triggers, and weighting systems. It gets very complex. Updating those and managing those with some accountability is really a difficult process by itself. It’s very easy to pencil whip. Having an intention there is important.

Russel:  That goes to a whole conversation about engineering judgment and what is it in this domain, right?

Matt:  Right.

Russel:  That, we could do probably a whole series of podcasts just on that subject alone. I would say that the thing, it’s the biggest challenge, is the threat inventory. In my experience, it’s not the threats that you have listed and are managing that get you. It’s the threats that something’s changed, and there’s a threat you should be managing, and you’re not managing that threat. Those are the ones that tend to get you.

Matt:  Exactly.

Russel:  Sometimes, that’s very nuanced. Like, I might be managing geotechnical threats, but because of something that changed related to a river crossing, a slope, or something that is new or different that I’ve never seen before, and maybe the industry’s never seen before, that’s the one that ends up becoming the problem.

That threat inventory is, I think, one of the really big challenges. It goes to the whole conversation about updating, because every time you come up with a new threat you have to manage, well, then you’ve got to build all those other capabilities around managing that threat.

Matt:  Right. The other great challenge in that threat inventory…I like that term, Russel, threat inventory. That’s a good language.

Russel:  That comes from cybersecurity. That’s a cybersecurity term.

Matt:  [laughs] That’s good. Interacting threats, that’s the big challenge in front of the industry right now in integrity is the interacting threats.

You mentioned geotechnical hazards. A river crossing, for example. The river crossing may have a threat of scour, may have a threat of dynamic loading from debris in a river, but then you start to think about, “Okay, at that same location, I might have external corrosion. I might also have cracking. I might also have X, Y, Z.” And these things start to compound and interact. I might have a manufacturing anomaly, and that’s hard to analyze for and make into a program.

Executing it, that’s where it gets really challenging is those interacting threats, which may actually be unknown threats or new threats, like you said.

Russel:  I think that’s absolutely right. It’s interesting to me, we tend to put a lot of focus on… When we talk about risk analysis, we get into all this stuff about consequence analysis, likelihood analysis, and all the math that we can do around all that.

I don’t know that we have as much emphasis and a program around managing the threat inventory. Maybe I just invented a new Integrity Management word or phrase, and you can utilize that. I’ll give it to you freely because I freely and openly admit I am not an integrity management guy.

Matt:  [laughs] You may have just created a whole new area of service in the industry.

Russel:  Yeah, well, sorry, pipeliners. [laughter] I asked you about an overview of the process. You laid out risk assessment. What’s the next component of the process?

Matt:  Next, once you have your results of that risk assessment, you basically have a prioritized list of your pipeline assets, and you move quickly into what’s called integrity assessment, which is a process to go out and collect data about these pipelines.

This is intimate data. We’re talking advanced technology and sensors, and it can be a very planned and expensive process, because it is very technically driven, and requires a lot of equipment.

There’s three primary assessment methods that are utilized in the industry. You have podcast episodes on a lot of these, Russel, so I think it’s good ties to other parts of your content. Inline inspection is one primary assessment method, and is definitely, we’ll say the primary method in the industry and preferred in a lot of cases. The second is direct assessment. The third is pressure testing. Pressure testing oftentimes gets interchanged with hydro testing, because water’s the most common test medium, but there are other ways to do it. There are some other technologies that exist on top of those.

Russel:  Yeah, you can do it with nitrogen, yep.

Matt:  Yeah, nitrogen or product, the actual product itself. You move into those integrity assessment methods, inline inspection, direct assessment, pressure testing, and then there’s an allowance for other technology, “other technology.”

Russel:  We’ve done a lot of episodes, and I did a whole series about various kinds of ILI. I don’t know that I’ve done a podcast on direct assessment or pressure testing specifically. I think people can understand pressure testing. That’s pretty self-evident. You put something in the pipeline, you run it up to pressure, and make sure it holds the pressure. What about direct assessment? What is direct assessment?

Matt:  Direct assessment is a lot more common in the natural gas industry, less common in the liquids space. Direct assessment is an indirect type of process. I say indirect as in you don’t usually have access to direct measurements of the pipeline itself.

It’s conducted in a four-step process. There’s a pre-assessment, an indirect inspection, direct examination, and a post-assessment, in a nutshell. It’s a series of threat-specific assessments. You typically have to isolate a single threat with direct assessment, such as external corrosion.

ECDA is the acronym there for that threat, but it involves a data analysis. You normally conduct different types of voltage surveys for external corrosion, and they’re cathodic protection driven surveys, and coding quality surveys.

You might have environmental or a soil type of survey, geotechnical survey, and you classify those into different anomaly categories. You have to maintain criteria.

Usually, you have to develop an algorithm, and that may be a policy type of algorithm or ranking method. You elect to do investigative digs based on those. It’s a series of evaluations of your system, determine feasibility, collect data with these normally indirect methods of above-grade surveys, perform digs, and evaluate the results.

It’s very similar in nature to what the inline inspection process is. However, it is single threat specific. That’s one of the primary advantages of inline inspection, in a lot of cases, is you can evaluate and collect data for multiple threats at once, whereas direct assessment is typically focused on a single threat.

Russel:  Cool. Once I’ve got my integrity assessment done, what happens next? What’s the next step in the process? Let’s unpack that a bit.

Matt:  Once you conduct your assessment, which is really the data collection phase of the cycle, you move into a response and mitigation phase. Your response might be performing immediate repairs and immediate maintenance on things that really stand out.

I have a corrosion anomaly with these certain dimensions, and I know I can calculate a failure pressure, and it’s within my safety factor range, so I need to go and repair that. That would be an example of a response and mitigation activity.

You would take all the data you collect from your assessment, whether that’s an inline inspection or a direct assessment process, or even a pressure testing process, and you generate that maintenance backlog, basically.

Then you perform what would be referred to as a pretty typical integrity dig program. I think a lot of people are pretty familiar with integrity dig programs, and it kicks you into your construction process and the like.

The back-end of that is really looking at did we find what we thought we would find? The results from our assessment tell us X. We went and do the repairs, do the responses, mitigate the sites, but did we find what we thought we would find? That’s a really important component of the process, is taking your actual findings, pairing them up to your predicted or your expected, and validating…

You get into that statistical question of, “Okay, if I’m looking at 10 percent of everything, is the 10 percent I looked at what I thought it would be?” If yes, that’s good. If no, I need to take a step back and continue forward or collect more data, learn a little bit more, and reset to put myself in position for a good path forward.

Russel:  I think one of the things that outsiders, people that don’t understand Integrity Management, don’t get about Integrity Management as a science is there’s some art to it, actually, because you’re dealing with very large data sets.

The data that you have is not exact. It all has different kinds of limitations as to what it can find or not find, and what’ll cause difficulties with the data, and so forth. Again, it comes back to that conversation of engineering judgment of am I seeing the things I need to see, and am I seeing them accurately?

Most incidents that are related to some kind of Integrity Management challenge were something I didn’t see. They might have been masked because of the way we analyze the data, or a limitation of the tool, or it was something that you couldn’t get to through an ILI, or direct assessment, or whatever. It’s all of those things that make Integrity Management challenging.

Matt:  That’s exactly right, Russel. It’s really, as you’re making those judgment decisions on is my data set good, you have to equally have that understanding of what technology did I use to collect this data in the first place?

Every technology has a bias to it. As an example, an MFL tool, from an Inline Inspection perspective, has a very difficult time seeing crack and features that have low volume loss from a cross-section. You want to make sure you don’t draw conclusions about cracking based on that data set.

Things like that, you asked earlier, what’s an area of risk assessment that you need to watch out for? I would say, on the back-end of this process, that’s the biggest thing to watch out for there, is make sure you understand the limitations and the biases of the technologies you’re using to collect data in the first place.

Russel:  Yeah, again, it’s another one of those things that makes Integrity Management really challenging, is I’ve got to pick the right tool to get the data to evaluate the threat I’m concerned about. Then, I need to also make sure that I’m looking at all the right threats.

It’s just, there’s not a perfect solution that you run a tool through the line, and it says, “Oh, you need to fix this one.” It just doesn’t work that way.

Matt:  No, exactly.

Russel:  Then what’s the last step? Let’s go ahead and transition. What’s the last step in this process? Once I’ve done my response and mitigation, what happens next?

Matt:  The last step in the integrity process is really integrating your data. Data integration, you establish performance measures and metrics, and package that all up as a continuous improvement cycle. A continuous improvement cycle, I think, is pretty easy for people to understand.

I’m going to repeat the process, and every time I do it, I refine it. A pretty standard quality type of view. Looking at your performance measures, those are normally pretty high level and pretty generic. How many leaks did I have this year? I want to reduce that number.

How many anomalies did I have? I want to reduce that number, or what was the growth I showed? I want to reduce that number. Those are just, as far as pressing on KPIs and performance measures, there’s structure around that.

A lot of that gets reported to PHMSA, and there’s annual reporting for these types of things. The big challenge in the integrity space today is data integration, though. PHMSA has, especially in 195, PHMSA has some data integration requirements that operators have to get to, which is pretty challenging.

It’s forcing you to connect all these different data sets about your pipeline, your environment, your attributes, your operating history, etc. It’s like you mentioned, Russel. It’s taking the approach away from run, collect data, bing, here’s my list of repairs, complete those, and I’m done.

Pig and dig is a nice phrase that people tend to use. It’s taking you away from that and towards a more comprehensive analysis. Like you mentioned about interacting threats, new threats, and capitalizing on those, and being able to analyze historically. Data integration really is the final frontier of managing your pipeline integrity.

Russel:  I don’t know if it’s the final frontier, but it’s definitely the next major frontier. I’m sure, once we get that in hand, we’ll come up with something else we can do to continue to make things better.

This whole data integration conversation, being a civil engineer guy by education, but I spent most of my career working in software. A lot of what I’ve done is figuring out how to structure data in a consistent systematic way. That is a huge challenge in Integrity Management because the nature of the data sets that you get from these tools is extremely large, and every tool and every tool vendor has a different kind of data that it generates.

Then, they have to do work to take and get it into something that an integrity engineer can analyze. Even that data is not necessarily presented in an industry standard way. It’s a huge challenge to figure out how to get all this data together.

Then, once we get it all together, there’s going to be another huge challenge that we’re not really talking about a lot yet, but it’s coming. That’s how do we visualize all this data? How do we visualize these interacting threats? That’s a whole bag of worms, too.

Matt:  Yep. Like you said, maybe that next frontier, that might be that next frontier. Getting your data integrated and consistent so that you can even have the opportunity to use it for some of these advanced analytics and visualization, and just these other tools that probably don’t exist yet.

Russel:  Right.

Matt:  That’s a great point. That’s where you’re going to want to go, yeah.

Russel:  I think you’re right. Those tools don’t exist yet. There’s some interesting work going on around those subjects, but it’s really, to get there, we’ve got to standardize the data sets so that we can do these other things. You can’t do that until you figure out how you’re going to manage the data.

Listen, Matt, this has been great. I always love talking to Integrity Management guys. I’ll tell you, when I first started the podcast, I started with people I knew. I did a whole bunch of stuff on control room, SCADA, and data communications in SCADA systems, and various kinds of communication media, and got really geeky and really detailed about all that.

I avoided pipeline integrity, because I didn’t know anything about it. I think I’ve gotten to the point I’m dangerous, meaning I can talk the lingo, but I don’t really have any experience doing the work. [laughs]

Matt:  Yeah. Pipeline integrity really is operations and maintenance. You live in that space, so it’s part of it.

Russel:  Yeah, absolutely. Look, I sure appreciate you coming onboard. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get you back, and we’ll dig deeper into some of these subjects.

Matt:  That’d be great, Russel. Thanks for having me.

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

If you’d like to support the podcast, please leave us a review on Apple Podcast, Google Play, or on your smart device podcast app. You could find instructions at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com.

[music]

Russel:  If you have ideas, questions, or topics you’d be interested in, 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 week.

Transcription by CastingWords