In this week’s episode of the Pipeliners Podcast, host Russel Treat is joined by Alan Redding from Consumers Energy and Laura Ade from South Jersey Gas about the recent Gas Control Committee Meetings held during the 2024 AGA Operations Conference. 

2024 AGA Operations Conference Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms

• AlanRedding is the Director of Gas Control at Consumers Energy and part of the 2023 AGA Gas Control Committee. Connect with Alan on LinkedIn.
  • Providing Michigan with electricity since 1886, Consumers Energy is one of the largest combination utilities (electricity and natural gas) in the United States. 
• Laura Ade is the Supervisor of Gas Control & SCADA at SJI Utilities. She currently serves as Vice Chair of the AGA Gas Control Committee. Connect with Laura on LinkedIn.
  • SJI, an energy infrastructure holding company based in Folsom, NJ, delivers energy services to customers through two primary subsidiaries:  SJI Utilities (SJIU) and SJI Energy Enterprises (SJIEE).
• AGA (American Gas Association) represents companies delivering natural gas safely, reliably, and in an environmentally responsible way to help improve the quality of life for their customers every day. AGA’s mission is to provide clear value to its membership and serve as the indispensable, leading voice and facilitator on its behalf in promoting the safe, reliable, and efficient delivery of natural gas to homes and businesses across the nation.
• Cybersecurity is the state of being protected against the criminal or unauthorized use of electronic data, or the measures taken to achieve this.
• Colonial Pipeline Cybersecurity Incident: In May 2021, a cyber attack was launched against Colonial Pipeline that eventually resulted in the payment of $4.4 million to resolve the attack. The attackers gained access to Colonial’s systems and data through an unmonitored VPN by stealing a single password.
• Operational Technology (OT) cybersecurity references the software, hardware, practices, personnel, and services deployed to protect operational technology infrastructure, people, and data.
• Environmental Management Plan (EMP) is a regulatory tool that helps ensure that a project’s construction, operation, and decommissioning avoid adverse impacts and increase positive benefits.
• Control Room Management is regulated by PHMSA under 49 CFR Parts 192 and 195 for the transport of gas and hazardous liquid pipelines, respectively. PHMSA’s pipeline safety regulations prescribe safety requirements for controllers, control rooms, and SCADA systems used to remotely monitor and control pipeline operations.
• Alarm management is the process of managing the alarming system in a pipeline operation by documenting the alarm rationalization process, assisting controller alarm response, and generating alarm reports that comply with the CRM Rule for control room management.
• Rupture Mitigation Valve (RMV) is any automatic shut off or remote-controlled valve that an operator uses to minimize the volume of gas released to mitigate the consequences of a rupture.
• Pipeline SMS (Pipeline Safety Management Systems) or PSMS is an industry-wide focus to improve pipeline safety, driving toward zero incidents.
• MOC (Management Of Change) focuses on planning the processes in a system, the type and quality of changes required, the risks associated with the plan for change, and the people that will be impacted by the change so that it is clearly communicated to stakeholders.
• SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) is a system of software and technology that allows pipeliners to control processes locally or at remote locations.

2024 AGA Operations Conference Full Episode Transcript

Russel Treat: Welcome to the “Pipeliners Podcast,” episode 337, sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, driving safety, environmental protection, and sustainability across the natural gas and oil industry through world class standards and safety programs.

Since its formation as a standard setting organization in 1919, API has developed more than 800 standards to enhance industry operations worldwide. Find out more about API at API.org.

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 every episode. This week, our winner is Christina Rodriguez Mendez with Genesis Energy. Congratulations, Christina. Your YETI is on its way.

To learn how you can win this prize, stick around till the end of the episode. This week, we talk with Alan Redding of Consumers Energy and Laura Ade with South Jersey Gas about the recent Gas Control Committee meetings held at the 2024 AGA Operations Conference. Alan, Laura, welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast.

Alan Redding: Thanks, Russel. Glad to be here.

Laura Ade: Good afternoon, thank you for having us.

Russel: We’re sitting here on Thursday late afternoon. These guys are not at the bar. They’re sitting with me doing a podcast, so thank you very much, Alan, Laura. Alan is currently the chair of the Gas Control Committee.

Alan: I’m first chair, so I’ll be chair next year.

Russel: First chair with the Gas Control Committee, as is Laura. I didn’t get to go to Gas Control this year, and I’ve been going to Gas Control for a decade, but I was over in the Quality Management Committee and some other guys from our team. Thanks for coming in, because I need to know what’s going on in gas control.

Laura: Of course, we have a lot going on.

Alan: If you’ve never been to an AGA event like this, the first two days are our committee meetings, and we best describe that as gas control immersion. It’s just deep dives, people in a room sharing our stories, sharing our struggles, and going through. Then the second couple days are more topic oriented. More classical, what you’d expect to see at a conference in the way of presentations.

Alan: You pick and choose for the areas of your interest or responsibility. We covered a lot of topics, some industry lessons learned, weather forecasting, employee staffing dynamics, compliance, regulatory expectations, pipeline safety management system. It’s a full suite, so lots of stuff.

Laura: We got a ton done, and then outside of that, we’re working on some white papers. We were able to work in our small groups with that in person. It’s always nice to get that face to face. It’s amazing how much more productive you are just having that half hour meeting in person versus the hour long meetings on Teams that we’ve been having.

Russel: A lot of us, myself included, might have a little bad etiquette on the whole Teams thing, because it’s easy to answer a phone call or answer an email while you’re sitting there on the Teams meeting.

Laura: Absolutely.

Russel: When you’re in person, you end up looking at people in the eye and you get engaged. What were some of the key highlights that came out of the Gas Control this year?

Alan: We had a heavy emphasis this week on cybersecurity. The trouble, the conflicts going around the world, there’s a lot of things happening in the cyber world.

We’re not able to know exactly what could happen, but we know that we need to be prepared to have some sort of manual operations. I think we all walk away with that, that the tools that we have and are comfortable using to make our decisions…

Russel: Do you remember where we were 10 years ago when people started first coming around and knocking on the door about cybersecurity and, “This is going to be a pain in the backside. We don’t want to do this”? I’m probably saying that too strongly, but there was a lot of skepticism about how real the problem was.

I would say that in that way, the industry’s attitudes completely shifted. I went to a presentation late this afternoon, like the next to last presentation. That’s my level of dedication here.

It was about emergency response, and they were talking about cyber as well as a number of other things where nefarious actors were actively…The scenario was around, there’s nefarious actors, and they’re doing vandalism and other things.

At the same time, you got a cyberattack. You have vehicles that have electronics on it and they’ve been hacked and you can’t start them. That sounds a little wacky, but boy, I’ll tell you, given what I see in the world, I don’t think that’s that far stretched anymore.

Alan: No. I don’t want to say you got that it’s not if, but when mentality, but you almost have to feel that way.

Russel: I think it’s more like, if you don’t keep the locks on the doors, the criminals will get your stuff.

Laura: Gas Control has been more proactive in that conversation with our cyber teams. I think that so many of us are able to be in the trenches with our cyber teams making those decisions and seeing those networks become more robust. We’re actively part of that conversation. It’s a great feeling to be a part of that solution.

Russel: I’ll say from our standpoint, as a software provider, 10 years ago, it was very common for us to have remote access so that we could get connected and make changes. Nobody gives us remote access anymore. What we get is maybe a Teams meeting and we’re looking over somebody’s shoulder, but they’re hands on. It’s a different world we’re living in than 10 years ago.

Alan: We obviously need to be ready for our manual operations, but then also, how do you unwind it, and how do you come back and know that your stuff is secure? In gas control, we go by, bad information is worse than no information. You got to prepare for that also.

Russel: I think also that the other thing is, how long are you going to have to do that? If you look at the Colonial incident, they were offline for what? 10 days, something like that? That’s a long time to be manually operating a system.

Colonial, because they deliver fuel, they could turn everything off. There were consequences, but they could turn everything off. We’re delivering gas and electricity, it’s driving electricity to the grid. We can’t turn off as natural gas providers.

Laura: I like to joke that it becomes a war of attrition with your personnel. You need to have those layers. We always joke amongst ourselves of what layer of cyberattack are we planning for? Because there’s different operations for each of those.

If it’s only your OT network, then we have a secure plan for our manual operations, and then does it get to the level of a worldwide EMP? I know it sounds insane, but we have gone to the level of it.

Russel: The fact that utility companies are looking at that and thinking about it, I think that’s a good thing. That actually gives me some confidence. The other thing is, all of our phones are VoIP.

When Hurricane Ike came through in 2008, I was in Houston and we lost a building, but we had one building that was hardened, and that became our operating center immediately after the hurricane. We were using copper lines to make phone calls because nothing else was working.

The Internet was down, cell towers were down. The first responders had taken control over those communications networks. It was tough to just get a note out to your family and let them know you’re OK for a few days.

Laura: We’re starting to see that those POTS lines coming back, radios, satellite phones. Again, it’s not just planning for secondary plans, but planning to tertiary levels. We’re planning what next and making sure that old Boy Scout motto of be prepared, that’s definitely the Gas Control motto.

Russel: You’re speaking to my heart there when you talk about Boy Scouts and being prepared. That’s good. Certainly, cyber is thematic and event response is certainly thematic as well. What else did y’all cover?

Alan: CRM is always going to have its place in the gas control…

Russel: For the people who are not gas control people, we’ll decode, that’s control room management, not customer relationship management, but control room management.

Alan: I’m probably one of the eldest in the Gas Control Committee that I started in 2010, and so right at the beginning of control room management and the install, putting it in place, going through the audits, learning from everybody’s audits. It does feel good from an industry standpoint that it’s been in place now for 12 years.

We’ve all been through a few audits and inspections. We all understand what the expectations are and so we’re starting. We still have places where we discuss that and bring it in, but it’s good to have some discussions on just getting better.

Russel: What was the conversation in the committee about? What part of CRM is the hardest at this point to really do well and get the value out of?

Alan: Point to point verifications are still a struggle a little bit. I think the struggle is it’s very intensive and uses a lot of resources. We’re looking at that. I don’t know. What were some of the other ones?

Laura: Trying to determine what best practices are, because like you said, CRM has been in place now for a while. We all checked the boxes because we had to, and now we’re in that point of improvement and we’re trying to figure out what that improvement is. That looks different for everyone.

Fatigue management is a big one of focusing how to balance work with their home life and making sure that they’re well rested and that we’re offering good options for them to fight that fatigue. Shift work is horrible. I did shift work for 18 years. I totally understand.

Russel: There are people out there that, for whatever reason, they’re somehow weirdly attuned to that.

I am not. I’ve done a little bit of it, but boy, it wore me out.

Laura: I joke that this is my first time having a big girl job and having to get up in the morning, because I did shift work for so long, and it is a strange adjustment.

Trying to offer things to help people have a normal life outside of the control room and making sure that the level of discipline and attentiveness, that we have that time, that vigilance time at SCADA and that they know what they’re looking at.

Russel: Did y’all talk at all about where people are with alarm management, or is that not on the agenda this time?

Alan: We didn’t hit alarm management real hard.

Russel: We’ll talk after, because I have some recommendations for the Fall Committee Meeting.

Laura: Great.

Alan: Excellent. Also, the rupture mitigation, RMVs, it’s still out there. We’re talking about that and how it’s being implemented in the studies.

Russel: There were some really good papers on that. I went to the one with Advantica, I think. They had done a study. It was very interesting. They went through a structured study looking at, I think it was like 2,200 valves, figuring out, what are the areas of isolation, and what are the valves controlling those areas of isolation? They got it down to like 40 or 50 areas and like 100 valves, which it’s like, “Wow.” That’s pretty good.

Laura: We hit pretty hard on PSMS and management of change also.

Russel: Oh my gosh.

Laura: It’s funny, so I was leading that part of the discussion and I was joking ahead of time that I got the boring subject because no one looks at MOC and thinks, “This is really awesome.” We had such a good discussion.

Russel: I went to a MOC panel, and it was packed. Every seat taken, people standing up around the walls. A lot of times in these sessions, the Q&A comes and it takes a second before the question. As soon as they said, “Q&A,” it was like pow, pow, pow.

I think MOC is a big deal, and I think a lot of people are struggling with it. It reminds me a lot of when control room management first came out and everybody was trying to figure out what is this. I think that’s where we are with MOC.

Laura: I think MOC goes hand in hand with team training, and thinking how many groups you touch, so I liken it to, think of like a spider web, in that, we’re not touching things in this department goes down to this department, goes down to this department.

It really is a web and a conglomeration of so many departments that are intermingled, and so many departments need to be part of that discussion in getting that handoff.

Russel: This is good. I didn’t get to have this conversation with you guys, so we can have it now. This is awesome.

With what we’re doing with our products, we have MOC related to policies and procedures, and we have MOC related to changes in the SCADA system and the CRM. Those are what I would call simple MOC. They’re very important within the control room organization, but they don’t need to go outside of the control room organization.

One of the presenters was a gentleman from PG&E. I don’t recall his name. I’ve got it written down. We’ll try to get him on the podcast. He was talking about MOC from an enterprise standpoint, which that’s what you’re saying, Laura, is that MOC, when you look at that understanding what is the scope and scale of the change, is really a big, big part of MOC.

If it is just a departmental MOC, the enterprise needs to know the change was made and have a record of it for compliance reasons and maybe for safety performance reasons, but it doesn’t need to proactively manage it. If it cuts across departments, that’s a whole different conversation. I think MOC is huge.

Alan: It is.

Laura: Someone raised the question of the difference between MOC between an operation standpoint, something like pigging versus MOC of something procedural. I think that we all hit on the idea that, while on paper pigging looks like it’s a lot to take in, and it is, we’re changing a lot of things.

Russel: It’s a complex activity.

Laura: It really, really is. I think that the procedural is something that we spend more time explaining to a lot of our controllers and doing a deeper dive into, because they need to wrap their head around something that changes their daily routine versus something that’s changing the operations for a day or two.

Russel: That’s a normal, not usual operation.

Laura: Exactly.

Russel: That’s not really an MOC.

Laura: You’re now changing what their normal is, so it’s the new normal per se, and you’re having to change their outlook.

Russel: You’re hitting on something, Laura, that’s a big part of the struggle that people are having with MOC. Where is the boundary between doing the work and having a change you need to manage? Then, where is the boundary between routine versus normal, but not routine operations?

If I run pigs and I run pigs once every five years, that’s a normal operation. It’s just not usual. If I have a detailed procedure, I may have something I need to do to prep to run that procedure, but I’m not changing the procedure. You’ve got that in every single domain in pipelining.

It’s fascinating. It seems on the surface to be simple, but it’s extraordinarily complex. Anyways, I can get animated about this. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.

Alan: The only other one was effectiveness. We’re all writing and working on effectiveness, finding the right metrics, and even bringing some analytics into the control room, which is a positive step forward.

Russel: I couldn’t agree more. That’s a big part of what we got to do to get our safety performance up. We got to know, what are the things we’re measuring? I think this will be easier to do in the control room than in other areas of companies, but to get to an agreed set of standard metrics and an agreed way to measure so that we can all look at how we’re doing versus everybody else.

There’s going to be a need for my own custom internal metrics as well, but to have some subset that we can benchmark against.

Alan: Industry standard.

Russel: The equivalent thing would be, I can look at damages per 100 mile pipe, and that’s a number that everybody ought to look at, and we ought to be able to agree how we score that, but there might be, “What about, is it cast iron pipe, or is it steel pipe, or is it plastic pipe, and then is it excavation dam?” There’s all these other ways to slice and dice it.

Alan: Even the subset of that is to get out of, we don’t want just lagging. We don’t want to be stat trackers. We want to be leading indicators, what’s leading us.

Russel: What I would say is getting clear about what the leading indicators are and what they mean is pretty challenging. It’s easy to understand the lagging indicators, but the leading ones are hard.

Alan: A lot of them are enterprise, they’re company based, so it’s leading…We do T3 measurements for being ready for outages, having our equipment stuff ready to go.

Russel: Those are more operational metrics than pure control room metrics. I’ll get really spun, and I don’t mean to take us to someplace y’all already talked about. Again, one of the big things is just thematic.

Alan: I’ll share an example. We track how many times our control room goes out, how many times we exceed five alarms per hour per controller per shift. Looking at that, we have found that we violate that when we run pigs, when we do point to point verifications, and when we expect really cold weather. That’s what I shared with my team.

We know that, so what mitigative steps are we going to take when we do pig runs? Do we bring in another controller? Do we have that discussion that “This is going to happen today?” Are we comfortable? Do we feel that like we’re OK with that, that it’s normal? 

Russel: Thank you. That’s an interesting conversation, because from a pure safety science standpoint, that’s a high risk operation. If you always get an alarm flood associated with running a pig, then where does gravity take you? Gravity takes you to when I’m running a pig, I ignore the alarms. That is certainly elevated operating risk.

Alan: Right. We list them that morning at our DOR, we talk about it, or the day before, saying, “Tomorrow, we’re doing this. Do we need to bring another controller in? Do we need the controller? If you get in trouble, because you got two other qualified controllers doing other jobs, sitting in the other room, call them in here.”

Russel: Let the controller know that, “Hey, if you’re starting to get too many alarms, you can call the supervisor in to help you work the alarms,” or whatever.

Alan: Exactly.

Russel: That’s fascinating. A pig run becomes a leading indicator.

Laura: Right.

Alan: It’s not all the time. Our goal is to have 90 percent of our shifts compliant. We see when it is, and we can go back and track, and especially point to point, because they’re running…

Russel: They’re running things up and down, and that’s probably more of, we actually know that around this set of points, we need to silence those alarms while that activity is going on. That may be we need a policy, or a process, or a new feature in the SCADA system or something that allows us to do that.

Laura: I think that’s a big part of alarm management, we have gas controllers. We don’t have alarm responders. Their job is not to specifically look at alarms and respond to them. Their job is to control gas.

Alarms are part of that, but a big part of our alarm management philosophy is staying ahead of it and making sure that you’re not getting those nuisance alarms or whatever. We look at it on a weekly basis. We scrapped that monthly thing. We said we would rather get ahead of it and look at it…

Russel: There’s a lot of operators that do that because it just makes more sense in the normal business cycle to do it weekly versus monthly.

Laura: We found it made such a change in, not only our metrics, but in our ability to just fix things right then and there. It has done wonders for our management. We get the alarm flood report, we go through every alarm that comes in. We actually go through it on a daily basis.

We’re a smaller operator, but then we still have our weekly meetings and make sure that we’re addressing every alarm. I always say that complacency is the worst thing that could happen. You never want to have, “That’s just that alarm that always comes in at Monday at 8:00.”

Russel: When that starts happening, that’s a significantly elevated risk.

Laura: Absolutely.

Alan: That’s also the time to have that mitigative discussion about alarm prioritization.

Russel: We’ve been doing some entry. The reason I asked about alarm management is we have a lot of people right now reaching out to us that are looking at modifying their approach to alarm management and looking for something that’s more effective, more efficient. We’re doing some work on risk based alarm management. Anyways, I’m taking us out in the weeds a little bit.

Maybe we can talk about that offline, and if it makes sense, we’ll do a presentation at the fall conference.

Alan: Continuous improvement.

Russel: Exactly. Anything else of note that was discussed?

Alan: No, I think we’ve covered most of it. I’m going to tell you, I’ve been here since Saturday. I’m exhausted.

Russel: Let me tell you, you’re not the only one. I’m in desperate need of a nap. One of the other things that I wanted to ask you guys about, I know that you had a presentation about weather forecasting. Weather forecasting is a particularly big deal with utilities, because weather’s a big part of the load. Any interesting conversation or takeaways from that?

Alan: I’m going to let Laura.

Laura: It’s interesting to see what companies keep their weather forecasting within gas control itself, and how that is going into their load forecasting, and how AI is playing into that. It’s just a whole new world out there.

I’m new to gas control. I’m new to this industry. Alan said he’s one of the older ones there. I’m probably the youngest one sitting in there. Not young age wise, but I’ve only been in here since 2019.

Russel: I find, there’s a lot of inconsistency, in my experience, between operators and how they do weather. Some people would do it in the load group. Some people would do it in gas control. Some people don’t have a lot of confidence in algorithmic approaches to getting to load.

They want people to do it because they want that experience. It’s all over the map. Alan, what’s your take on that?

Alan: I was just going to say I’ll let Laura answer that. I’m fortunate. I work for a company, and we have a lot of storage, so we control 50 percent of our supply. We don’t get the hourly. Some of them, the meter to meter companies get hourly forecasts and load projections.

For us, we get it in the morning, we get it in the afternoon. It gives us a footprint of what we expect for the day. With the amount of storage we have, we just brute force it. 

Laura: I think a lot of companies are starting to shift to those AI models and starting to get in the weeds of getting more on par with their forecasting versus a guy who sits in the corner with his spreadsheets that he’s compiled over the past 20 years. He’s the only one that knows how to do it, and once he leaves, no one…

Russel: If, God forbid, he gets hit by a bus.

Laura: You know what? That’s why I was hired for my job, legitimately. It was what I was told in my interview. I think that most companies are trying to get away from that.

Russel: PHMSA is driving companies that way. They’re asking companies to have procedures, and processes, and systems in place that are survivable. The whole weather thing’s fascinating. I did a deep dive in that a number of years ago with the guys from, I’m going to have to apologize, I don’t want to mispronounce the name, but Marquette. Is that right?

Laura: Yeah.

Alan: Yeah, and Tim was there…

Russel: I talked to Tim a little bit at one of the breaks. What they do is fascinating. For some operators from some utilities, particularly people like those in the mountains, they may have a system that’s relatively small geographically, but their weather can be radically different across their system.

Then, for other operators, if you’re in a flat land, weather’s weather. It doesn’t change much across the system. There’s a lot of variability in operations. Anyways, look, thank you, guys, for taking the time at the end of the day. I think it’s time for happy hour.

Alan: I agree with that.

Russel: If you let me take you to the bar, I’ll buy the first round. How’s that?

Alan: Appreciate that.

Laura: Thank you so much.

Russel: Thanks for being here, guys. I appreciate you.

Alan: Thanks.

Laura: Absolutely.

Russel: I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of the Pipeliners Podcast and our conversation with Alan and Laura. Just a reminder before you go, you should register to win our customized Pipeliners Podcast YETI Tumbler. Simply visit PipelinePodcastNetwork.com/Win and enter yourself in the drawing.

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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.

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