In this week’s episode of the Pipeliners Podcast, we’re featuring host Russel Treat’s guest appearance on a recent episode of the “Pipeline Things Podcast,” with hosts Rhett Dotson and Christopher De Leon. The conversation explores the intricate relationship between control room operations and integrity management in pipeline systems.

The episode covers the historical evolution and current regulations impacting control rooms, such as the 2007 Control Room Management Rule and the recent rupture detection requirements. The conversation highlights the critical role control rooms play in mitigating consequences of pipeline failures, emphasizing the importance of adequate information and alarm management to enhance safety and efficiency in pipeline operations.

Intersection of Control Room and Integrity Management Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms:

• Rhett Dotson is a Chief Engineer with D2 Integrity, LLC. Connect with Rhett on LinkedIn.
• Christopher De Leon is the Director and Principal Consultant with D2 Integrity, LLC. Connect with Christopher on LinkedIn.
  • D2 Integrity, LLC was founded in 2022 by Christopher De Leon and Rhett Dotson. The company has grown into a B2C and B2B ILI focused engineering, consulting, and advisory firm. They specialize in delivering expert ILI based engineering assessments, consulting pipeline operators and technology companies to achieve best in class ILI based pipeline integrity assessments, and support investors with ILI technology and market SME advisory services. Their principal objectives are to create value for our clients and provide an enjoyable professional working environment.
• The CRM Rule (Control Room Management Rule as defined by 49 CFR Parts 192 and 195) introduced by PHMSA provides regulations and guidelines for control room managers to safely operate a pipeline. PHMSA’s pipeline safety regulations prescribe safety requirements for controllers, control rooms, and SCADA systems used to remotely monitor and control pipeline operations.
  • 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.
• Valve and Rupture Rule is a newly updated PHMSA regulation. This rule establishes requirements for rupture-mitigation valves, such as spacing, maintenance and inspection, and risk analysis. The final rule also requires operators of gas and hazardous liquid pipelines to contact 9-1-1 emergency call centers immediately upon notification of a potential rupture and conduct post-rupture investigations and reviews.
• Cybersecurity is the state of being protected against the criminal or unauthorized use of electronic data, or the measures taken to achieve this.
• Custody Transfer Measurement is a measurement facility that has been designed, fabricated, tested, installed, and operated in compliance with specific industry standards documents, such as AGA-9 standard for multipath ultrasonic meters.
• EFM (Electronic Flow Measurement) has become a preferred method of natural gas measurement.
• PHMSA (Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration) ensures the safe transportation of energy and hazardous materials.
• HMI (Human Machine Interface) is the user interface that connects an operator to the controller in pipeline operations.
• NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) is a U.S. government agency responsible for the safety of the nation’s major transportation systems: Aviation, Highway, Marine, Railroad, and Pipeline. The entity investigates incidents and accidents involving transportation and also makes recommendations for safety improvements.
• Integrity Management is a comprehensive approach to ensuring the safe and reliable operation of pipelines, involving risk assessment, inspection, maintenance, and regulatory compliance.
• The Marshall Incident refers to the Enbridge Incorporated Hazardous Liquid Rupture and Release, which occurred on July 25, 2010, in Marshall, Michigan. Read the full NTSB Accident Report.
• Slack line is a condition when both liquid and vapor exist in a liquid pipeline at the same time. A similar term is column separation.
• SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) is a system of software and technology that allows pipeliners to control processes locally or at remote locations. 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.
• The San Bruno or PG&E Incident in September 2010 refers to a ruptured pipeline operated by the Pacific Gas & Electric Company. The rupture created a crater near San Bruno, California, caused an explosion after natural gas was released and ignited, and resulted in fires causing loss to life and property.
• Upstream is the operation stage in the oil and gas industry that involves exploration and production. 
• Midstream is the processing, storing, transporting and marketing of oil, natural gas, and natural gas liquids.
• Downstream is the process involved in converting oil and gas into the finished product, including refining crude oil into gasoline, natural gas liquids, diesel, and a variety of other energy sources. The closer an oil and gas company is to the process of providing consumers with petroleum products, the further downstream the company is said to be.
• ILI (In-line Inspection) is a method to assess the integrity and condition of a pipeline by determining the existence of corrosion, cracks, deformations, or other structural issues that could cause a leak.
• The Bellingham Pipeline Incident (Olympic Pipeline explosion) occurred on June 10, 1999, when a gas pipeline ruptured near Whatcom Creek in Bellingham, Wash., causing deaths and injuries. Three deaths included 18-year-old Liam Wood and 10-year-olds Stephen Tsiorvas and Wade King.
• Pipeline Right-of-Way is a strip of land encompassing buried pipelines and other natural gas equipment allowing them to be permanently located on public and/or private land to provide natural gas service.
  • Listen to the mentioned episode over hydrogen with Michael Istre here.

Intersection of Control Room and Integrity Management Full Episode Transcript:

Russel Treat: Welcome to the “Pipeline Podcast, Episode 342,” 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 is 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.

[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 appreciate you taking the time. To express that appreciation, we give away a cool YETI Tumbler to one listener every week. This week, our winner is Jonathan Taylor with Kinder Morgan.

Congratulations, Jonathan, your Yeti’s on its way. To learn how you can win this prize, stick around until the end of the episode. This week, I join the “Pipeline Things Podcast” and talk with host Rhett Dotson and Christopher De Leon of D2 Integrity about the intersection of control room and integrity management.

Christopher De Leon: All right. On this episode of Pipeline Things, we get into the control room. We have a very special guest. The one maybe who lit started the spark that created the fire that is Pipeline Things.

Rhett Dotson: The mustard seed.

Christopher: The mustard seed. Even if that wasn’t his original intent. Let me ask you a question. How familiar are you with control room management, specifically the rule that was created in 2007 and its full adoption in 2012? Or have you ever heard of the rupture rule and its impact on control room management?

Or maybe if you ever thought about how closely related integrity management, pipeline integrity management, and what happens in the control room actually are. We get into that. It’s a great episode today. We hope you enjoy it on this episode of Pipeline Things.

[music]

Christopher: What are you doing?

Rhett: I was trying to do my own dance this time.

Christopher: Oh my god.

Rhett: Is that not…Wait, you get to make up a dance and I’ll get to make up a dance.

Christopher: If you want to do it, have some rhythm. If not I’m going to do the Hitch thing where he…On the movie Hitch, where he says, “Just right here, buddy. Right here.”

Rhett: You know what? We’re going to let…

[crosstalk]

Rhett: …we’re going to let the audience judge the quality of the dance that I threw down and they can rate it…Leave your comments on LinkedIn or on the YouTube channel…

Christopher: Or just text us.

Rhett: …or what you think of Rhett’s sweet dance moves. Sweet.

Christopher: Yeah.

Rhett: Hey, today.

Christopher: What’s up, buddy.

Rhett: …it’s going to be exciting. We have a great guest coming on and talking about things. I am really pumped about this episode. To segue…

Christopher: It’s possible that it’s his fault that we have Pipeline Things, and we’ve talked about this a little bit…

[crosstalk]

Christopher: It’s possible. He was like the gateway drug for me.

Rhett: Exactly. He tampered with something, he didn’t realize, and it just went way beyond what he expected.

Christopher: You know how some people picked up habits during COVID they’re like, and it transformed them like, “Oh yeah, because of COVID, I got to do this.” I feel because of COVID we took away podcasts, so we got some benefit out of it.

Rhett: Yeah, for sure. That wasn’t the only time, somebody played with something and maybe it went a little further than they thought you guys had fun family. I know I have to do this. I know your sign. I told Amanda was going to the podcast.

Christopher: This is memorialized now. Once this airs, like it’s not coming off the Internet.

Rhett: It’s not for sure.

Christopher: We could play this at like his wedding or something.

Rhett: You’re going to play it out there. Tell me what happened. Come on, be vulnerable. Share family time.

Christopher: You guys know that we also use the podcast to keep you guys up to date. What’s going on in Casa De Leon or at the Dotsons. We have a newborn Matteo. We’re experienced at the whole baby game.

Rhett: Maybe number quattro.

Christopher: Yeah, and that’s a good job. Amanda has done a great job of getting all of these things to help her be more efficient at being a mom. She has this whole setup of these bottle brushes now, like different sizes, different tools and all this fun stuff.

I’m working and then I just hear Amanda yelling, “No. [mumbles] .” You hear the commotion and you can know my wife’s pitch. I’m like something’s going on here, Lail screaming, Lail and I’m a tail Lail, my five-year-old. He’s screaming. I’m like, “Oh god.” I run over there.

I get over there. The bottle washer is stuck in the back of his head and he’s screaming.

Rhett: For those who don’t have kids, they have to appreciate the bottle washer is like a Dremel tool with a brush attached to it.

Christopher: Yes. It’s a Dremel tool. My son’s been growing out his hair, because his buddy has long hair, so it’s probably about seven or eight inches long now on the top. It’s all in there dude. It’s still spinning. It’s spinning, it’s rotating.

He doesn’t know how to turn it off and it’s stuck in his hair. The whole house is loud. I finally get it out and he’s missing a solid, like two by three inch chunk of hair on the back of the poor kid’s head.

Rhett: Let’s just say now that he’s played with that toy, he is never playing with that toy again.

Christopher: I’ve thought about giving him a buzz cut just to fix it.

Rhett: I bet you it’s still tender back there. I bet you, if you go touch his head, I bet you the whole area is still tender.

Christopher: Yeah, it was a very interesting afternoon yesterday.

Rhett: If you talk to Chris in this time period, he seems stressed out or tired, it’s because you don’t know what chaos happened at Casa De Leon.

Christopher: You know what? Somebody told me they were like, “Why would you start a business and have a baby in the same year?”

Rhett: I’m real curious how you answered that question, but I don’t…

Christopher: Yolo, right? Yolo.

Rhett: Yolo. Hey, I think it’s time because I want to make sure we leave as much time as possible for the person who played with fire and created this podcast that we have today. I guess we owe an appreciable thanks for what he did for us.

Without further ado, I think we need to introduce Russel Treat back, not back onto our podcast, but onto our podcast.

[crosstalk]

Russel: So good to be here with you guys. So good to be here.

Rhett: Welcome. Thank you for…

[crosstalk]

Russel: I was appreciating the dance steps. I was thinking I might come through with a little cotton eyed Joe or something. You know something guys, this doesn’t feel quite right.

Christopher: Oh, OK.

Russel: Just one second.

Rhett: OK.

Russel: Did you? Unplanned moments or the…

[crosstalk]

Christopher: Did you…?

Russel: …podcast.

Christopher: Oh, hey, wait up.

Rhett: I thought we had a producer for a reason. If you’re not watching on…

Christopher: Where’s the quality game?

Rhett: …on YouTube, I think this is the definition…

Russel: That feels so much better to me. That seems so much more appropriate.

Rhett: Russel, would you like to reintroduce the podcast? At this point it feels is there something we need to know? It’s no longer Pipeline Things with your host, Rhett Watson and Christopher De Leon. I’d like to welcome you to the Pipeline Podcast Network with your host, Russel Treat, and your guest, Christopher Daly, owner of Red Dawson.

Russel: Oh, that’s so awesome. This bit is never going to get old. This bit is never going to get old. Thank you for letting me bring the backdrop. I appreciate that, guys. Thank you for the kind words. It’s really interesting about the whole podcast thing.

We’re not really competitors. We’re collaborators, right?

Christopher: One hundred percent.

Russel: We’re all trying to do the same thing. We’re all trying to put together information for the industry, help people do a better job of being pipeliners and it’s all good. Anyways, great to be here. Thanks for having me. Thanks for letting me bring the backdrop. Because you know…

Rhett: It was on our notes. We’ll roll with it. It is really great to have you on Russel and you’re absolutely right. Your content and our content are both complimentary and great. This past week I came across and I’ll call it out your episode, I don’t remember the number, but it was the one with Michael East on hydrogen.

I loved the dialog that you and Michael had on hydrogen and sometimes not always being…Like you presented, this is what I think is going to happen. Then Michael, this is what the industry is trying to get to. It was a great example of something we probably wouldn’t tackle, but really enjoyed listening.

Russel: I really love doing the stuff where I don’t agree a hundred percent with the guests, which is perfect for this. No, I think we learn hearing that conflict, and learn better if there’s engagement and disagreement, but honest, intellectual, thoughtful disagreement.

Christopher: To keep our partnership — Rhett and I healthy — I always try to keep us in debate and not arguing. There is a difference.

Russel: It’s healthy conflict, right?

Christopher: Healthy conflict.

Russel: There’s a gentleman that works in my business called Scott Williams and Scott William and I have worked together for longer than either of us care to admit. He’s our lead software developer. We’ll get in a room and we’ll be flushing out something we need to do on the roadmap.

People will walk by and they’ll like, “Oh, those guys are like, and they’re fighting.” They’re right. We are, but we come out and we’re laughing and shaking hands and they don’t get it. “Look, you guys, you don’t get it. We’re not fighting each other. We’re fighting together for something.”

Christopher: To get us to like us talking about cyber security policies…

[crosstalk]

Rhett: Boys are like, “Oh, mom and dad are fighting again.”

Russel: Cyber security, the gift that keeps on giving.

Rhett: Boy, you’re not lying. Hey, we brought you one for a very specific reason this time around. I’d like to give you a chance to talk about, because most people definitely know you as the original pipeline podcaster. Our thought in bringing you on this week specifically had to do with dealing with the control room.

If you don’t mind, I’d like to give you the floor for a little bit and let you describe your background and experiences, like why would we bring you one as the expert in control rooms? Russel?

Russel: Yeah, thanks for that. It’s awesome to be a guest. It’s a pleasant change of pace.

Rhett: Are you conflicted? Where’s he going? Is he leading this right? Did he lead that…?

Russel: My background I’m an engineer by education, civil, but I w I’ve worked in software since really the early ’80s. I was in the first Air Force unit to automate all its work order and job order process. When I got out of the military, I worked in cryogenics for a bit.

Then I worked for a software company where we would find engineering software and commercialize it. I did that for a bunch of years, and then transition into running a software company doing custody transfer measurement back office.

Custody transfer measurement, that’s where you’ve got a meter, and the fluid is changing ownership. Somebody’s looking at that measurement, making sure it’s correct. Then that feeds into the general journal or the invoicing or whatever.

That’s how I grew up in the business. When I got into oil and gas and I started doing measurement, I loved it. I ran a software company doing that back-office stuff for about seven years. I left and started EnerSys. I started out doing measurement. That’s when EFM was just starting to get big. Everybody was putting in radio networks and collecting the data and then…

Christopher: EFM?

Russel: Electronic flow measurement. Thank you. Yeah, getting off of charts and moving to electronics. Particularly the big transmission systems that were adapting to 4 quarter 636, which was started in the early ’90s and it changed the big transmission gas companies from buyers and sellers of gas to transporters of gas.

Measurement and daily measurement started becoming really important. That led to looking at the automation, all that kind of stuff. Then people started wanting to put that information on screens in the offices, and then that led to control room.

Then after doing control room for about 10 years, the whole PHMSA control room management rule came out and…

Christopher: What time frame is this?

Russel: Control room management was originally came out in 2007.

Christopher: 2007?

Russel: Right, and it became effective in 2010 and fully effective in 2012. During that period of time, we were looking at, “What do we need to do a better job in the control room for regulated pipelines? What is this rule going to mean? What kind of software tools? What kind of processes are they going to need?”

We started building product for that. At that same time, I was also starting to look at leak detection because whenever you start looking at a regulated liquid pipeline, leak detection is one of the requirements.

My kind of technical path started with measurement, moved into telecoms, moved into HMI, and then started looking at alarm management, high performance human machine interface and leak detection, right?

I’ve become an expert in those fields because it easily builds up on all the other stuff, right? That’s a little bit about my background and how I got to know control room. I probably put control rooms in for more than a dozen regulated pipelines. I’ve been involved with close to 30 different pipeline operations and some in quite a bit of detail.

Christopher: Appreciate that background. Help me understand a little bit. I’ve had less awareness of the control room. I’ve been in probably two or three control rooms. What really sparked this was when we went through the NTSB failure arc that we did, I was very surprised by the important role the control room played in some notable failures.

I feel sometimes like integrity management is a bit removed from the control room sometimes. When you talk about a failure, both come into play, there’s an integrity management component that usually plays a role in the failure, and then the control room usually plays a role in the failure too.

I’m curious what’s your opinion of the role between integrity management and control room?

Russel: It’s such a great question. Such a great question.

Christopher: All I do is ask great questions.

Russel: Yeah. No, it goes to the…I say this a lot, the pipeline world is very technical and we operate in a lot of hyper vertical domains. Somebody who’s doing deep in the weeds integrity management, and they’re doing life calculations, risk calculations, and SMICE calculations, and all of that and determining what to dig and when to dig and all that stuff.

They’re so deep in that detail that it’s sometimes hard to see the overview of how the pipeline company, how it all fits together. The way I say this, and I say all the time, I’m not an integrity guy, but I’ve worked closely now with a number of integrity groups on various projects.

Integrity management is about leak prevention. Control room management, as it relates to leaks, is about leak detection and response. If you look at some of the major incidents we’ve had in the last 10, 15 years, the control room contribution has not been the incident itself, but the scope and scale of the consequence, where the control room didn’t do nearly as good a job as it could have done to mitigate the outcome.

Integrity management’s trying to prevent leaks, control room management’s trying to mitigate consequences.

Christopher: It’s a perfect way to paint that picture for us. If you guys were thinking, “Oh, they’re good friends. That’s what made sense to bring Russel on it.” In fact, no, it just happened organically. We went through a handful of failures and that’s exactly what we did. We’re very vertical on the integrity side.

We start somewhere. We go real deep and we’re, “Hey if you look at the ally tour, you look at how they could have responded to this feature or the risk management side of probability failure, really more than anything.” Whereas the consequence of it was probably more around something more abstract.

You’re right. We identified that maybe we could have done a little bit better job on the consequence side. Here you are.

Russel: Yeah. It’s interesting. If you can look at some specific incidents and one that’s probably most people are familiar with is the Marshall incident. In that incident in particular there were integrity management issues, but the reason that incident was…

The scale of the incident was what it was. They were in the control room, they were struggling with trying to understand, do they have a leak or do they have slack lines?

Christopher: That’s what they call column separation?

Russel: Yeah.

Christopher: Same thing?

Russel: Same thing.

Christopher: Slack line column separation.

Russel: Yeah. It’s basically when the liquid converts to a vapor given the hydraulics of what’s going on inside the line. That’s one of the big challenges with leak detection and doing what’s called CPM, which is computational pipeline modeling.

You’re taking the data from the SCADA system. You’re running it into a big math model and it’s performing calculations. You’re looking at imbalances over 1 minute, 5 minutes, 20 minutes. If those imbalances get too big, you’re like, “Oh, I’m going to alarm this as a leak.”

The challenges of the leak alarms we get, very few of them are actually real leaks. They’re normally some other kind of operational upset that causes the leak detection algorithm to flag something.

Christopher: That’s really where I want to go with you today because you’re hitting on so many things. I remember reading, and Marshall, you’re right, is a good example because I think they had some 60 alarms. It was an incredible number of alarms that they were faced with.

The story, the way it played out, even reading the NTSP report, it was awesome to recount it on the episode because I could see myself sitting right there where they were dealing with conflicting information, conflicting opinions, but it played out similarly in other ones, right?

Even in Bellingham, you had challenges with restarting the pipeline and asking questions about whether or not they had a leak. You had the control room in San Bruno where they were debating whether or not it was an airliner that had crashed.

You had a solid, I think it was 90 minutes. You had at least 20 minutes where they had the data to believe that they had no upstream pressure increase on the downstream. They were still sitting there rationalizing, “Do we have a leak?”

Russel: Yeah, if you look at the Southern California, Huntington Beach offshore incident, same thing. They were having a whole bunch of process upsets on the pipelines that massed. They were getting leak alarms, but they were also simultaneously having process upsets. It took them a while to figure out they actually had a leak.

PHMSA put out the rupture detection and they’ve set some criteria now about what an operator’s supposed to do. Without getting into all the detail around it, basically what they’ve said is, you got 30 minutes from the time you think you might have a leak until you shut the pipeline down.

Christopher: You know what? This is a good time to take a break. I actually want to take a break. When we get back, I want to actually dive into that rupture detection rule a little bit more and ask you something about the regulations that you mentioned between 2007 and 2012, and talk about how it’s impacted the control room.

Stay with us. We’ll be right back in just a bit as we continue this conversation. All right. Welcome back to this edition of the Pipelineres Podcaster/Pipeline Things. What pipeline show are we on? Do we know, do we settle it?

Russel: I think we’re actually on Pipeline Things but…

Christopher: It’s Russel’s show today.

Russel: I’m the guest. I’m clearly the guest. I’m happy to be the guest.

Christopher: We are having so much fun with…

Russel: It’s nice to be the guest.

Christopher: I want you to know every time there will be a show now, and I see you set up with a camera and a mic, I’m going to sit down respectfully.

Rhett: Respectfully, we know how you operate sometimes.

Russel: Exactly.

Christopher: Russel, I have maybe a comment/question. Again, we consider ourselves integrity SMEs and I can’t help, but find this parallel in that from an integrity perspective, we talk about a lot in our podcast is dealing with uncertainty, dealing with integrating data to make the best decisions possible.

One example of that is dealing with an ILI report. We get an ILI report, there’s all these features and you’re having to decipher almost with the information you have, what do I respond to? I can only imagine someone in the control room is often dealing with that.

We saw this in the failure files, how are these guys, over the course of the last maybe call four or five major incidents, how are they now better equipped or better trained or, how has that process changed for them to hone in on, on what matters?

Russel: Yeah. I’ll talk a little bit about what’s in the control re-management rule to address that. Because that’s been around now 10 years and there’s a level of maturity starting to happen in the control rooms. There’s been a lot of change. Two key things there. One is what they call adequate information.

Adequate information is the idea that I got to make sure the controller has appropriate information to have situational awareness, right? That’s a big, big subject, man. Part of that is what you put on the screen and how you put it on the screen for them.

It’s also all these other systems they have access to, plus what other communications are you giving them. That’s one aspect. The other aspect is alarm management, right? Meaning, and this comes out of Bellingham specifically because Bellingham occurred in the midst of an alarm flood.

Alarm flood being so many alarms coming in the control room. I can’t make heads or tails out of them, so I ignore them in order that I can actually respond to something. There’s been a whole lot done to separate out these are the things that are really the safety related alarms, versus all the other things I might need to know about, to make that stand out. Those things have gotten a lot better in the last 10 years.

Christopher: Because you mentioned regulation, right? Something went off for me, when you said adequate information, we have a very similar process in ILI. When you get an ILI report, you have to issue discovery.

Different operators and even different, I’ll say, the police force of regulators, so the auditors, will have their own interpretation of how and when to issue discovery. An example, some operators will say, “We have to issue discovery within five days of receiving a report.” How does that parallel?

Russel: If you raise up the altitude of the question and you talk about it from a quality management standpoint, I’ve got to get from data to information and then from information to decision.

Christopher: [laughs]

Russel: Same thing in the control room.

Christopher: Did you pay him for that?

[crosstalk]

Christopher: Hold on, hold on, but how…?

Russel: This isn’t new, man. This has been around for 50 years. This comes right out of the work that Demming did. It’s the same thing in the control room. What high-performance HMI is about and what alarm management is about is practice that’s been developed and has been around for a long time, and is now being applied to pipelining to do that.

Christopher: On the integrity space, we see that from an ILI to when you have to issue discovery, there’s a maximum of 180 days. Now there’s beginning to be some interpretations around, “Well, you can’t just use the whole 180 days because if you’ve got the ILI report in 45 days, you can’t just sit on your hands. Issue discovery.”

Is there anything in regulation from a control room side where it’s like you need to have adequate information and respond by X time?

Russel: The rupture rule, in my opinion, is an attempt to do that. When you start talking about leaks, there’s different types. The rupture rule gives the operator the ability to define for you what is a rupture.

What I would say a rupture is, is it’s a full loss of integrity and containment. That’s more of an ILI definition. The definition in the control room is something like a pressure change of this much over this period of time, put in the terms of the systems that they use. The bottom line is a big leak happening quickly.

Christopher: Full loss is a great way to help get that message across.

Russel: The rupture rule says if you get one of those, you need to shut down in 30 minutes. You have to have a mechanism of defining it. You have to have a mechanism of responding. There’s got to be some mechanism to have a clock ticked down because you have to have all the valves closed, all the fluids stopped, everything isolate.

Rhett: Wait, all the valves on the entire system between pump station?

Russel: Around the rupture.

[crosstalk]

Rhett: Around the rupture.

Russel: Generally, the way that’s done is they’ll isolate an entire segment.

Rhett: Got you.

Christopher: The next natural question I have is, is 30 minutes enough time?

Russel: Oh, yeah.

Christopher: That’s interesting. Just look at the responses that we saw in the failure files.

Rhett: It is really interesting because you mentioned leak versus rupture, and we saw that play out in Centerville, where the leak in that dent was 400 times less than what they could actually detect.

Christopher: An escape system, yeah.

Rhett: I can appreciate the difference between a leak and a rupture, but your rupture rule, I want to ask you about that because you’ve described it twice now in this episode.

When I hear it, I think, “Man, that sounds,” I’m going to use the word heavy-handed, but not in a negative sense. It sounds very much like PHMSA coming down and saying, “Yep, I’m going to make you do X,” which it sounds like shut down. I’m curious, has that rule been effective in achieving the intent? Do you think it’s been interpreted and handled the right way?

[pause]

Rhett: Oh, I made him think.

[laughter]

Christopher: I think he’s trying to control his response.

[crosstalk]

Russel: I just thought about, “Here’s what I’m going to say.” Then I’m thinking, “Well, here’s what’s going to be heard when I say that.”

[laughter]

Russel: Then I was thinking, “Here’s what’s going to happen when APA heareth what I think I said. Look, let me put it this way.

Rhett: [drums] I’ve got full control of drum roll.

Russel: I’m going to frame it a different way.

Rhett: Go ahead.

Russel: What is the public expectation if there’s a rupture in my backyard?

Rhett: I think that it’s mitigated, I’m going to say, as quick as practically possible. Obviously, I don’t think Marshall was that quick.

Russel: How long do you think it should take if you have a rupture in your backyard?

Christopher: Minutes.

Rhett: Minutes? OK, let’s say it’s definitely not an hour. I agree with that.

Christopher: Independent of fluid, minutes.

Rhett: I agree, it’s definitely not an hour, but then look, I hate to say it, man, you’re both just making an argument for the ASV/ROV rule.

Christopher: That wasn’t the question. That was not the question. The question was, what is expectation?

Rhett: I know we didn’t go there, but let’s keep my expectations minutes. We agree.

Russel: Then you get into, what’s the practical reality of being able to meet the public expectation?

Rhett: If you don’t have…

[crosstalk]

Russel: What I would say is the rupture rule’s moving us in the right direction. It’s causing people to get really clear about what a rupture is. That clarity’s necessary for a level of safety performance. It’s also get causing people to get very clear about what’s required in order to identify and isolate a rupture.

I want to say one other thing about this, because what you’re not asking and should be asking. This is, fairly simple, if I have SCADA system, if I have high communication rates and have a good CPM to identify a potential leak quickly and to work through that quickly. Getting that done in 30 minutes is reasonable, particularly for the more mature operators. It’s reasonable.

There’s work to get there and such, but it’s reasonable. The risk is not there. The risk is when I restart the pipeline. That is a whole different conversation because the control room’s job is to get the pipeline shut down and isolated. Then you’ve got to follow a process to make sure you don’t restart into a leak.

Because if you look at these big incidents, it’s not been…You’re cleaning that front part up as part of it, but the other part of it is you can’t restart into the leak. That’s where all the risk is.

Christopher: What you’re getting to is it’s the tether or nonexistent tether between integrity management, which is the prevention of full loss and management of consequence on the front end, and managing the consequences, what’s that tether between integrity and control management?

Russel: Now there’s a third person in the tether though, because operations has got to be brought into that conversation because they’re the ones that are going to walk the line or fly the line. Or see if they can find any indication of leak.

Christopher: How is that happening? Is that changing?

Russel: I mean that’s been the practice forever. It’s just that that’s costly and it takes them out of production, it can be difficult to do, and it’s not perfect. Because depending on the rupture and where it’s located, you might not get an immediate indication.

Particularly if you shut the line down, you don’t know where it is until you pump enough fluid out. It’s a challenging problem.

Christopher: Yeah. Again, just as an example of that tether, we saw that with Centerville, where the senior integrity engineer said, “Hey, there’s a dent call here in the ILI report. Go check it out.” Then they found the leak, right?

[crosstalk]

Christopher: Just that tether is becoming more and more clear. I want to ask one…

Russel: I think that’s where we’re headed is it’s going to be that if we get a leak alarm and shut down, then what’s the appropriate rigor before restart.

Rhett: I was curious where we’re moving there to make improvement because you’re right. That was related directly to Marshall. I remember there were multiple 911 calls and it was eventually a consumer’s employee who found the issue.

I was thinking in my mind I remember they had to escalate. They didn’t want to walk the full line in that particular instance. Things must’ve changed since Marshall and now on…

[crosstalk]

Russel: If you look at Marshall and amplify the one on Southern California both of those were underwater Marshall in a swamp and the Huntington Beach one offshore. You can’t walk that line. The one off Huntington Beach was at night. How do you find an indication at night?

These things are not simple. Identifying the potential defects, finding the features and the features requiring evaluation and the defects and all that. That’s one part. Shutting the line down if you think you may have a lot, a leak is another part, but the risk we have in the industry.

I think our response is fairly immature here yet. Is how do I restart with certainty I’m not restarting into the leak?

Rhett: I don’t have an answer for that question.

Christopher: Yeah, I don’t have an answer for that one either.

Rhett: I want to touch on one more point. You mentioned adequate information. I thought you were going to go a different direction, Chris, when you asked that question. For me, that’s data integration that we deal with. It feels like data integration’s never complete.

It feels like it’s almost never adequate. You always feel like, “Oh, I could integrate this information. Yeah, I could integrate this information.” When you think about geo hazard, which is an emerging threat for us.

“Oh, if I would’ve integrated the rainfall. Oh, if I had integrated the fact that this operator had an issue. Oh, historically, if I talked to the field guys and I had integrated the fact that, ‘Oh, we had done a regrading of the right of way here.'”

It feels like you could go back endlessly in terms of data integration. I’m curious, do y’all face the same problem?

Russel: You do. You absolutely do. Because there’s I want to know that there’s work going on in the right of way.

Rhett: How many screens do you put up in front of them? Do you put up 30 screens and then you can’t focus on 30 screens.

Russel: Yeah, that’s high performance HMIs. What do you put on the screens? How do you arrange the screens? How do you navigate through all the data?

Christopher: That’s where I wanted to go with it, right? I keep wanting to draw these parallels to what we do, right? On pipeline things, which is ILI. I’ll try to frame it this way. In ILI over the last 30 years, we’ve seen improvement in sensor technology, right? Mechatronics, right? Calipers with sensors.

Then now it’s moving towards how to use machine learning to avoid some human error. I see so many parallels with you guys in controller management. On your side on the controller management, where are we seeing a lot of the innovation? Is it in data acquisition systems? Is it in algorithms? Is it in the way you behavior mechanics?

Russel: Yeah. Man, again, a great question. We’re…Boy, I could spend 30 minutes just talking about that. I’ve done a couple of projects on control room of the future and what does that look like? It would take a while to unpack all that. What I would say is there’s a lot of work being done.

There’s a company out there called CruxOCM. They’re doing kind of robotic control, autopilot for pipeline operations. It’s designed to take high cognitive load. Got to think hard to do it, right? For you Texans out there, got to think hard to do it.

[crosstalk]

Russel: Anyways, high cognitive load type tasks. Starting up a long transmission pipeline, I got to sequence the pumps the right way. I got to understand the densities of the fluid. I got to make sure that I keep everything’s within pressure bounds, so I can automate all that. Just hit one button, and…

Now what do I take, what do I ask the controller to do if they don’t have to spend all that time doing that start, and where does that attention go, right? Then the other thing is, I think there’s probably an equivalent opportunity because most of the alarm, particularly in leak alarming off of CPMs, your false alarm rate, meaning it’s not a leak, but it’s a legitimate hydraulic condition.

Not a false alarm, like I shouldn’t get that alarm at all, but I have a hydraulic condition, but it’s not a leak. There’s probably an opportunity to apply automation and artificial intelligence to that in order to quickly rule out hydraulic conditions.

Which anything we do like that so that I can take, and my alarm count goes from 10 a month to two a month, that’s a big deal.

Christopher: What goes to my mind is that’s where like things like instead of neural networks or something like that, you can use supervised machine learning, where there’s still a human component where the…

Russel: Exactly. What I would say is ultimately what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to get the human being working on the problem that’s uniquely suited to the human being. From this integrity engineer within their scope of control, where are the three to seven most significant features requiring investigation?

Christopher: Yeah. escalation. It makes more sense.

Russel: Then, the same thing in the control room, where are these alarms that really need to be looked at and looked at quickly?

Christopher: Yeah.

Russel: Right.

Christopher: I think we’ve done a good job.

Rhett: I have really enjoyed this episode.

Christopher: He’s done a good job. [laughs]

Rhett: It’s been a lot of fun. Even if the Pipeliners Podcast semi-hijacked it. There was a welcome hijacked. Russel, I really want to thank you for coming on and joining us you. I’m hoping, I’m certain, this won’t be the last time that we intersect on a podcast again.

I want to thank you for supplementing our knowledge on the control room side, for sure. You have one last question, statement you’d like to make?

Russel: I just want to shout out to you guys. I think what y’all are doing with “Pipeline Things” is great. You guys have raised the bar as to production level. I’m still purely audio.

[laughter]

Russel: You guys are doing all this fancy video stuff. I think what you’re doing is great. I love having these kind of conversations. I think that one of the things we can do, as a community, not just us but as a community in the pipeline world, is how do we get people to cross-collaborate.

When we have an incident, it’s not a single…It’s not integrity that failed. It’s not control room that failed. It’s not operations that’s failed. It’s the entire system that failed. How do we collaborate more effectively at that level?

Christopher: We’re leading by example today, aren’t we?

Russel: We’re certainly asking questions and noodling on what the challenges are. I don’t know that we came up with any solutions, however.

Christopher: It starts with collaboration. It’s not our podcast or your podcast. It’s mingling and…What do we call it, Rhett?

[crosstalk]

Rhett: It’s the Pipeliners Pipeline Things Podcast.

Christopher: [laughs]

Rhett: On that note, I want to say, again, thanks for joining us. Hopefully, you enjoyed his episode of Pipeline Things. We look forward to seeing you again in two weeks. I am your host, Rhett Dotson, with my cohost, Christopher De Leon…

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Rhett: …and our guest, Mr. Russel Treat. Thank you very much.

Russel: I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of the “Pipeliners Podcast” and our conversation with Rhett and Chris on Pipeline Things. 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.

If you’d like to support the podcast, please leave us a review wherever you happen to listen. You can find instructions at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com. 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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