This week’s Pipeliners Podcast episode features host Russel Treat providing a Pipeliners Podcast update on the show nearing the 100-episode mark.

Listen to this episode for updates on the podcast, the podcast’s history, and goals for the future. Also, learn more about the team that helps make this podcast possible and the exciting upcoming topics Russel will be discussing.

Pipeliners Podcast Podcast Update: Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms

• Ross Adams is an Account Services Specialist and Control Room Management expert for EnerSys Corporation, a pipeline operations software specialist. Listen to Ross Adams’ past episodes.
• Giancarlo Milano is a Senior Simulation Support Engineer at Atmos International, a pipeline technology company provides pipeline leak detection, theft detection, and simulation technology to the oil, gas, water, and associated industries. Listen to Giancarlo’s past episodes.
• Clint Bodungen is an industry-recognized ICS cybersecurity expert and has been an active part of this ICS Cybersecurity Community since 2003. Listen to Clint Bodungen’s past episodes.
• KC Yost is the Director of Onshore Services for Cronus Technology, a pipeline engineering firm. Listen to KC Yost’s past episodes.
• Jason Dalton is a Hydraulics and Leak Detection Supervisor at Marathon Pipe Line, a company supplies petroleum products through pipeline. Listen to Jason Dalton’s past episodes.
• Dan Sensel is a Project Engineer at Marathon Pipe Line. Listen to Dan Sensel’s past episodes.
• Kyle Miller is an Engineering Supervisor at Marathon Pipe Line. Listen to Kyle Miller’s past episodes.
• Larry Shelton is retired former VP of Performance Assurance for Buckeye Pipeline Company, a primary distributor of petroleum in the United States. Listen to Larry Shelton’s episode.
• Chuck Dotson is in charge of sound production for the Pipeliners Podcast. Learn more about him here.
• Terri Hoffman is the founder and CEO of Marketing Refresh, a digital marketing agency in Houston, and oversees marketing for the podcast.
• James Caldwell is the content manager and senior copywriter at Marketing Refresh, and is in charge of transcripts and show notes for the podcast.
• KC Krauss is the production assistant for the podcast.
• Gas Certification Institute is the authority on liquid and natural measurement training for oil & gas professionals and standard operating procedures (SOPs) for oil & gas companies.

Pipeliners Podcast Update: Full Episode Transcript

Russel Treat:  Welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast, episode 93, sponsored by EnerSys Corporation, providers of POEMS, the Pipeline Operations Excellence Management System, SCADA, compliance, and operations software for the pipeline control center. 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 Treat: Thanks for listening to the Pipeliners Podcast. I appreciate you taking the time, and to show that appreciation, we give away a customized YETI tumbler to one listener each episode. This week, our winner is Mike Jewell, with the City of Covington, Georgia Natural Gas System. Congratulations, Mike, your YETI is on its way. To learn how you can win this signature prize pack, stick around until the end of the episode.

This week on the Pipeliners Podcast, it’s just me. I want to give the listeners an update on the podcast.

We’ll talk a little bit about where we’ve come from since we started this thing and where we think we’re headed, or where we’re trying to head. At the end, I’m going to make a bit of a shout out and challenge the listeners to reach out and provide me feedback about how things are going and what you’d like to see.

When I started this all off, which was in November of 2017, rapidly coming up on two years now, I really had no idea how this would go. I didn’t know how I’d be received. It was one of those things that I’d had the idea for a long time, and it really just wouldn’t go away.

I just liked the idea of helping others learn the business the way I learned it, which is just by asking questions, being curious, and having conversations. Certainly, the feedback we’ve been getting says that it’s working.

That a lot of people are getting value from the podcast and that are getting information. They’re learning things, and that’s awesome. Before I dive into this too deeply, I want to shout out and say thank you to some of the people who have supported me and have supported the show.

In particular, we’ve had a number of recurring guests. [laughs] One of the challenges of doing this and keeping it interesting is finding the guest, finding the topics, and trying to cover new material, or old material in a new way.

I’ll tell you that there have certainly been times when that’s been challenging, and it continues to be challenging. I’m actually going to talk a little bit about that in a bit, about what we’re doing at the podcast to try and improve things.

Some of the recurring guests. First, I want to shout out to Ross Adams. Ross has been on a number of times, and several times, when I tapped him on the shoulder, gave him virtually no time to prepare, and said, “Hey, Ross, I think we need to talk about this subject. Can you take five minutes and get on the microphone?”

To his credit, he’s done it, and he’s done a great job. He’s one of the people who I know I can call on and will always be ready. Likewise, I want to shout out to Giancarlo Milano and Atmos International. Giancarlo was one of our very early guests.

He supported me in doing a whole series on leak detection and then continues to do that. Of course, Clint Bodungen, our perennial cyber security guru’s, been on a number of times. Also, one of those guys that I can call.

He’s got a setup at his office and can just hop on and have a conversation. The beauty of the cyber security market is things change so fast, there’s always something to talk about. This year, we added KC Yost.

KC’s been on several times, and we’re going to have him back here rather soon. He’s been able to really bring some interesting conversation around the history of pipelining. As a third generation pipeliner, a guy who keeps the photos and keeps the information, he always has a lot to offer.

I want to shout out to who I’ve affectionately called the marathon trio, Jason Dalton, Dan Sensel, and Kyle Miller. Those guys actually reached out to me. We’ve put together a number of episodes. They’ve been extremely well received.

I think pipeliners like to listen and hear from other pipeliners about what they’re doing to overcome their challenges. They’ve really added a lot of value. It occurred to me, as I was putting this together, it’s been a while since I’ve talked to those guys. I think it’s probably time to reach out and get them back on the program.

I want to make a particular shout out to Larry Shelton. Larry Shelton is a gentleman who I’ve had the pleasure of working with on some projects. He’s an extremely knowledgeable and extremely experienced pipeliner and operations executive with personal experience related to Bellingham.

He agreed after, I don’t know, I must have spoken to him for over a year to come onto to the podcast and share his story. I’ve had so much wonderful feedback from listeners about that story and Larry’s contribution. I’m just so grateful he was willing to come and do that.

I know that he’s gotten some feedback personally and feels good about having shared his story. Hopefully, there’s some others out there, too, that would like to reach out and share their stories. Also, just surprising to me, but the most downloaded episode in the history of the pipeliners podcast is the one by Justin Shannon of Marathon Pipeline on risk management.

It’s big, the numbers. [laughs] There’s a large margin. Obviously, there’s a lot of interest in risk management, and it’s probably a subject we ought to get some more people on the podcast to talk about.

I haven’t ever done this, but there’s a lot of people other than me that are involved in putting this pipeline podcast together. In particular, I want to name a few people that are really important to this. In particular, I want to call out Chuck Dotson.

Chuck does all of our sound production. He pulls out all of the ums and the ahs, the pauses, and does really excellent work to make this easy on the ears and help me and the guests sound intelligent, which is sometimes more of a challenge than you might think.

Also, James Caldwell. I don’t know if all the listeners know this, but of course, we have a website for the Pipeliners Podcast. Every episode has a webpage. On the webpage, there’s a block of show notes. The block of show notes will be definitions, links to resources, and such.

Then there’s a full transcript of the episode. James Caldwell is the guy who puts all that together. James, he’s a great writer, but not an engineer. He does a really excellent job of working his way through all of the jargon, buzzwords, and acronyms that we use in pipelining.

I actually think that’s one of the benefits, is he doesn’t know all that stuff. He’s going to look at that stuff up and make sure there’s definitions, which is awesome. I want to shout out to Terri Hoffman. She’s been instrumental in putting the website together and helping us just make sure that the content and the organization of that is good.

Also, we have a new addition to the team, been with us just a few weeks, KC Krauss, who’s the production assistant. I’d mentioned earlier that one of the challenges is finding, scheduling, and coordinating with the guests and having that continue to be good, high quality content.

KC has come on board and is helping with that. I would expect that to streamline and get a lot better over the next several weeks. I’m really excited to have her on the team. Then lastly, I want to shout out to my wife, Susan.

Susan does not work in the energy business. She works at our church, and really is not a technical person in terms of all the geekdom that we do on the Pipeliners Podcast. She listens to every episode, provides me feedback, and is my biggest fan.

I’m really blessed, because I think sometimes, she gets more of a kick out of it than I do, some of the response, and how things are received. Very, very glad to have her support as well, of course. I want to talk about where we’re going.

There’s a couple of things that are coming up. One of the things that’s coming up is new sponsors. Up until now, I have funded this through our operating companies, EnerSys Corporation and Gas Certification Institute.

EnerSys, being a company that provides software for the control room, and Gas Certification Institute being a training entity that trains in fundamentals, primarily around measurement, and provides measurement standard operating procedures.

That’s been awesome, but to sustain this and grow, and to do some of the other things we want to do, we needed to find some additional sponsors. We have some commitments from people to come in and sponsor. I’m very excited about it. You’ll be learning more about that as you hear those sponsors’ names called.

Part of what we’re going to do with the sponsorship is we’re actually building another part to the Pipeliners Podcast website. We’re calling it the Pipeliners Resource Library. Now that we’re approaching nearly 100 episodes, there’s a lot of that content that really needs to be organized, because it supports…

I actually know that some people are using the content for training. That’s the whole purpose. It’s the reason we put this together, to educate and to inform. That’s the whole purpose of the pipeline. That’s our mission. That’s what we’re trying to do.

To strengthen that mission, given the amount of content that we’re getting up, I wanted to create a way for the content to be easier to navigate and the supporting content, like the things that we link up in the show notes, I wanted to get that someplace where it would be easier to find, navigate.

So with that, if you’re a pipeliner, and you got a question about something, you’re trying to learn about something, there’s a place you could go to find that. We are working on that. It’s in development. We’ve actually been working on this for some time, but I think we’ll have something new on the website probably before the end of the year. Be looking for that.

Here’s the other interesting thing. At almost 100 episodes, we have barely even scratched the crust off the biscuit in terms of covering all the material and subjects that need to be covered or could be covered to understand pipelining comprehensively.

In fact, what I would say is, by the time we’ve covered everything, the first thing we cover is going to be way out of date, and it’s going to be time to start again. There’s a lot of topics that I’d like to cover in more detail.

I want to give you a list of these topics. As you listen to them, you’re probably going to have somebody or some organization come to mind that could provide guests that can talk to these subjects. One of the things I want to talk to, or talk more about, is accident investigations.

I want to talk about lessons learned, how you gather them, how you use them, how you use them for training. I want to get more content around measurement, and in particular, how measurement field practice is so critical to the accuracy about measurement, and how accurate measurement affects pipeline operations.

We’re going to be doing more episodes on pipeline SMS. I’m going to try and do some things that are about the various kinds of pipeline operations, and how SMS is different, given the kind of operation. If you’re gas transmission, liquid transmission, or large public gas utility or small public gas utility, what might be the considerations.

We’ve done one episode recently on public awareness, and I want to do more. I also want to cover damage prevention. In particular, I’d like to be able to do a series of episodes that would be supportive for the smaller operators that are trying to understand and build their programs.

In particular, around damage prevention, I’d like to create content that would be appropriate for the third parties they’re involved in operations around pipelines that need to know about that type of thing. Then we haven’t even spoke at all, really, about construction, inspection, record keeping around new pipe, or any of that type of stuff.

That’s a whole lot of material, and I am certain that, given everything we’ve covered up until now, and the things I just listed, there’s other things I’m missing that some listener would find valuable or useful. With that, here’s my request.

I’d like to hear from you. One of the things about doing the Pipeliners Podcast that’s a bit of a challenge sometimes is we do this stuff, and we put it out into the ether, and we don’t get a lot of direct feedback. Occasionally, we’ll get comments on YouTube and stuff.

That’s great. Thank you very much for those of you that have done that. If you haven’t done it, I encourage you to do so.

In terms of hearing from the listeners and hearing about specific episodes they’d like to hear about, or things they’ve learned, getting some solid feedback about how good a job we’re doing at executing our mission and input about how we could get better about executing our mission to educate and inform the pipeline community.

I’d be very interested to hear about that. You can get to this in two ways. One way you can do it is you can go to the pipelinepodcastnetwork.com website and submit information on the Contact Us page. I read every one of those, and I respond to all of them.

If you put information in there, you will get a response back. Likewise, you can also reach out to me on LinkedIn. My profile is Russel, R U S S E L. It’s one L. It’s an unusual spelling. Treat, T R E A T. You’ll find me on LinkedIn.

Thanks for listening. Thanks for the feedback that we have received about how this is helping you understand and learn. Help us get better at fulfilling our mission to educate and inform.

Just a reminder before you. You should register to win our customized Pipeliners Podcast Yeti tumbler. It’s really cool. If you’ve never had a YETI, you need one. These things are awesome. They keep the hot stuff hot and the cold stuff cold, and for a long time.

Just visit pipelinepodcastnetwork.com/win and enter yourself in the drawing. There’s a new winner every week. If you’d like to leave us a review, that’s a great way to support us. You can do that on iTunes/Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or pretty much whatever smart device application you use to listen to podcasts. You can find instructions on the website at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com.

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Russel: If you have questions, topics, ideas, let us know. Thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you next week.

Transcription by CastingWords