This week’s Pipeliners Podcast episode features Bill Caram, Executive Director at Pipeline Safety Trust, discussing the importance of pipeline safety in the pipeline industry.
In this episode, you will learn about the Pipeline Safety Trust, why it was established, and what they have accomplished in the industry. Bill also addresses how they are dealing with climate change, emissions leaks, and CO2 transportation.
Pipeline Safety Trust: Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms
- Bill Caram is the Executive Director at Pipeline Safety Trust. Connect with Bill Caram on LinkedIn.
- Bill has served as the Pipeline Safety Trust’s Executive Director since 2020 and serves with a passion for fierce independence, public safety advocacy, and environmental protections.
- PST (Pipeline Safety Trust) is a nonprofit public charity promoting pipeline safety through education and advocacy by increasing access to information, and by building partnerships with residents, safety advocates, government, and industry, that result in safer communities and a healthier environment.
- Read the referenced whitepaper: Carbon Dioxide Pipelines: Dangerous and Under-Regulated.
- You can sign up to receive their newsletter on the PST website.
- You can also access articles on pipeline safety in this Google Group. (Note: you will need to submit a request and ask to join the group.)
- 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.
- PHMSA (Pipeline And Hazardous Materials Safety Administration) protects people and the environment by advancing the safe transportation of energy and other hazardous materials that are essential to our daily lives. To do this, the agency establishes national policy, sets and enforces standards, educates, and conducts research to prevent incidents. They prepare the public and first responders to reduce consequences if an incident does occur.
- LPAC (Liquid Pipeline Advisory Committee) and GPAC (Gas Pipeline Advisory Committee) are statutorily mandated advisory committees that advise PHMSA on proposed gas pipeline and hazardous liquid pipeline safety standards, respectively, and their associated risk assessments. The committees consist of 15 members with membership evenly divided among Federal and State governments, the regulated industry, and the general public. The committees advise PHMSA on the technical feasibility, reasonableness, cost-effectiveness, and practicability of each proposed pipeline safety standard.
- PHMSA Final Rule: Pipeline Valve Installation and Rupture Detection Standards.
- AMPP (Association for Materials Protection and Performance) is a global community of professionals dedicated to materials protection through the advancement of corrosion control and protective coatings. AMPP protects infrastructure and assets worldwide through member and workforce education and credentialing, company accreditation, technological innovation, and global standardization.
- NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) is an independent Federal agency charged by Congress with investigating every civil aviation accident in the United States and significant accidents in other modes of transportation – railroad, highway, marine and pipeline.
- Fugitive Leaks are the unintentional and undesirable emission, leakage, or discharge of gasses or vapors from pressure-containing equipment or facilities, and from components inside an industrial plant such as valves, piping flanges, pumps, storage tanks, compressors, etc.
- PIPES Act of 2020 (Protecting Our Infrastructure of Pipelines and Enhancing Safety Act of 2020) was signed on December 27, 2020. This bipartisan law strengthens PHMSA’s safety authority and includes many provisions that will help PHMSA fulfill its mission of protecting people and the environment by advancing the safe transportation of energy and other hazardous materials.
- HVL (Highly Volatile Liquid) are a specifically defined subset of hazardous liquids subject to special regulatory requirements and means a hazardous liquid which will form a vapor cloud when released to the atmosphere and which has a vapor pressure exceeding 276 kPa (40 psia) at 37.8 °C (100 °F).
- Supercritical fluid is any substance at a temperature and pressure above its critical point, where distinct liquid and gas phases do not exist, but below the pressure required to compress it into a solid.
- Find out more about the DNV Dense Phase CO2 Pipe Rupture mentioned in the episode.
Pipeline Safety Trust: Full Episode Transcript
Russel Treat: Welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast, episode 228, 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 700 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, and to show that appreciation we give away a customized YETI tumbler to one listener every episode. This week, our winner is Ryan Yoder with TC Energy. Congratulations, Ryan, your YETI is on its way. To learn how you can win this signature prize, stick around till the end of the episode.
This week, Bill Caram, the Executive Director of the Pipeline Safety Trust, is joining us, and we’re going to talk about the Pipeline Safety Trust, its history, its work, and what it’s doing in the future. Bill, welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast.
Bill Caram: Thanks for having me, Russel.
Russel: I’m glad to have you. It’s awesome that we’ve got you on. What I want to do is I want to just start by asking you what is the Pipeline Safety Trust and how did you happen to get involved?
Bill: The Pipeline Safety Trust is a nonprofit organization focused on pipeline safety. Really we’re the only national nonprofit focused on pipeline safety. We were formed in the aftermath of a tragedy that I’m sure many of your listeners are familiar with, and that’s the Olympic pipeline tragedy in Bellingham, Washington in 1999.
That’s when a quarter million gallons of gasoline spilled into the creek that runs through our town here. It eventually ignited, and it killed three boys. I know you had a really powerful episode of your podcast dedicated to that tragedy that I found incredibly moving. That is the moral bedrock of our organization, and we were founded in the aftermath of that tragedy.
We still have family and friends of some of those boys on our board and still involved in the organization to this day.
Russel: How did you happen to get involved with the Pipeline Safety Trust?
Bill: I come from an environmental nonprofit background and worked in a river conservation organization and was looking to just take a next step. I saw an advertisement for a new Executive Director of the Pipeline Safety Trust.
I had come across them during the Dakota access pipeline protest. It was hard to find really independent information. Every time I came across something from the Pipeline Safety Trust, it just cut through all of that.
I was familiar with them. I saw they were looking for an Executive Director. I thought, “Wow, that would be pretty great.” The more I learned about it, learned about the story and learned about Carl and the board and the rest of the staff, the more excited I got about it. I’m honored and humbled to be leading the organization now.
Russel: You’ve got a very big pair of shoes to fill with Carl Weimer. It would probably be good to talk a little bit about who Carl is and what his involvement with the Pipeline Safety Trust is. I think the listeners would be interested to know that.
Bill: Big shoes to fill is an understatement. He really is a titan of pipeline safety. The amount that one man has been able to get done in his time is inspiring and certainly intimidating to come in and try to follow that.
It’s almost a relief. He’s been so great at what he does. Nobody expects somebody like that to come in afterwards. It takes the pressure off me a little bit actually. [laughs]
Carl was a member of the community and led a local environmental nonprofit when the tragedy happened here in Bellingham. When the families of the boys and the community was really trying to wrap their heads around pipelines and the risks and what it meant, Carl became a leader in that movement. When the organization was founded, it was natural that he would become the Executive Director.
Russel: For whatever reason, he very quickly became the voice of the community in the aftermath of the event.
Bill: He absolutely did. These values that we live by…Our tagline is that we’re credible, independent, and in the public interest. I think that’s really born out of Carl and who he is as a person. I think he just naturally demonstrates that and lives by it. The organization was built around that.
Russel: Let’s talk a little bit. How was the Pipeline Safety Trust actually put together? Who’s on the board? How does all that work? Again, I think it’s really interesting. You guys are very unique in that way as a nonprofit.
Bill: While the community was grappling with the tragedy and living with that grief and working through…Most of the community didn’t even know there were pipelines here.
To lose three boys like that and then to learn that this was really a preventable accident that happened because of a variety of reasons, the operator not doing what they should and a regulator not doing what they should, people were justifiably angry.
The families of the boys and the members of the community really advocated for the formation of a watchdog organization to watch both the industry and the regulators and make sure that they’re doing their jobs.
When it came time for the criminal sentencing of Olympic Pipeline Company, Judge Rothstein that day, she ordered that some money be set aside as an endowment to form this watchdog organization that the community was advocating for.
She said, “They won’t have anywhere near the lobbying potential of the pipeline industry.” Her words were “It’s not even David versus Goliath. It’s more like Bambi versus Godzilla.”
[laughter]
Bill: Which some days feels very true, but that “No industry polices itself. You need outside people. These are going to be those people, so listen to them.” I have to say that in a lot of cases, the industry and the regulators have listened to us. We’re a pretty small organization. I think our influence is outsized because of the importance that the industry and the regulators place on us.
Russel: That’s exactly, Bill, what I was going to say. I do think that your influence has very much outsized your budget and your headcount. I think there’s a reason for that. I know a lot of people who are pipeline operations executives. They follow very closely what the Pipeline Safety Trust is doing, not because they’re…I don’t even really like saying this.
It’s not like they’re watching the enemy. They’re actually looking at, “Well, there’s somebody who has a very different perspective. I want to hear what they’re thinking and seeing because I won’t hear that or think that or see that if they’re not there.” That’d be my take. It’s certainly my experience that you guys are trusted partners in the industry.
Bill: We like to think so. We like to live up to that. In my background in environmental nonprofit community, say around river conservation, there’s usually a multitude of different nonprofit organizations that each serve their own role.
One might be a bit of what the industry might consider the enemy, where it’s threatening lawsuits, a Deep Green type organization. Then you’ve got a more collaborative organization that will meet industry where they are and just try to pull them a little bit over to try to make a difference where the rubber meets the road.
You need all different kinds of those organizations to make real change. In the world of pipeline safety, we’re really it. We have to serve multiple roles. Sometimes, we can have a bit of an angry voice on that true watchdog organization. Other times, we really are a true partner. We meet industry where they are and try to pull them over to the side of safety.
Russel: You guys have representation, as members of the public, on both the LPAC, the Liquid Pipeline Advisory Council [Committee], and the Gas Pipeline Advisory Council [Committee] that review PHMSA regulations. I’ve gone to a number of those. I’ll be glad when they start doing them in person again. They’re events for those of us that are interested in such things.
I always find it interesting how those representatives are putting forward a perspective. Yet they’re always aware of their technical limitation. They bring that into the conversation.
“I see this this way. Here’s why I see this this way. I acknowledge that I don’t have this information or knowledge.” That way of thinking, that way of being is really important for what you guys do, in terms of being credible.
Bill: That’s very true. I try to do that. I just spoke at the first in-person conference since I’ve joined the Pipeline Safety Trust. I went to the AMPP conference. It used to be NACE.
I opened up my presentation with “I think everybody in this room has been involved in pipeline safety longer than me. I’m just going to do my best to bring the public perspective. That’s what I just hope to do.”
Really, when it comes to pipeline safety, the public is at that inherent disadvantage. The industry representatives, this is their job. They’re paid to do it. They live in it every day. The members of the public, they have other jobs. This is just affecting their life in some other way.
They don’t have that professional level of expertise. They certainly don’t have the technical expertise. We try to represent them as best we can. I fully acknowledge that I do not have the technical expertise that the operators have. I just try to learn every day.
Russel: [laughs] What’s funny about that comment, Bill, is I work in the business. There’s a lot of places where I’m often saying, “I can talk about this, but you need to understand I am not expert in this. I am talking outside of my expertise.”
Bill: That’s right.
[crosstalk]
Bill: If you’re doing it right, you’re learning every day.
Russel: Our business is so technical and so hyper vertical. You can’t be an expert in everything. Even if you were an expert in this seven years ago, you’re not an expert in it anymore.
Bill: That’s right.
Russel: There’s too much. It’s just more than one brain can deal with. You talked a little bit about Carl and the contributions of the PST. What are some of the major contributions that you think that the Pipeline Safety Trust has been able to make towards pipeline safety?
Bill: That’s a really good question. As I think about it, a lot of the progress that’s been made is really a collaborative effort. It’s hard to really tease out what exactly the Pipeline Safety Trust is fully responsible for, when it is really a team effort among stakeholders in a lot of cases.
There’s a couple things that come to mind, all before my time, under Carl’s leadership. One is excess flow valves. There was a time when they were not required. Carl really advocated hard for them. They ended up making it into law. Those automatically close and shut off the flow of gas when there’s a significant increase in pressure.
They’re now required on new construction. Even folks that are on existing lines can request an excess flow valve installed. I have to say if you can point to one thing that’s undoubtedly saved lives, it’s got to be that. Carl really led the effort on that one.
Russel: What’s interesting too is as we record this, it’s April 1st. Just yesterday, PHMSA put out this new rule on rupture and automatic valve and automated shutdown valves and all that stuff.
Bill: Automatic and remote shut off valves.
Russel: There you go. Those are the words I’m looking for.
Bill: [laughs]
Russel: Thank you. Again, it’s one of those things that there’s reasons why those things are being put in place. I don’t think anybody who’s an operator would argue that that doesn’t improve our safety.
Bill: I certainly think. We would love to see some progress where those go beyond just new and replaced pipe in high consequence areas, like the NTSB recommendation, but PHMSA’s got a lot of statutory limitations.
The rule is the best they were able to do, given those limitations. It will make new pipelines safer. I wish there was something we could do about those aging pipelines and have some similar valves on those.
Russel: I could make a smart-aleck remark about if we could just get people to approve putting in new pipelines, we could get rid of the old ones.
Bill: There you go.
[laughter]
Russel: I really don’t want to go down that rabbit hole.
Bill: [laughs]
Russel: The purpose of this podcast is education and information, not advocacy and such.
Bill: That’s right.
Russel: I don’t want to be kicking any hornets’ nests.
Bill: [laughs]
Russel: At least not on a podcast. That’s not my goal here. What is the Pipeline Safety Trust working on these days? What are some of the big things you guys are looking at?
Bill: There’s a lot of priorities these days. A couple of the bigger ones would be methane mitigation, methane emissions, fugitive leaks, those unintentional releases, leaks that would be, before the PIPES Act of 2020, considered non-hazardous, and then also blowdowns and those intentional releases.
From a climate standpoint, the Pipeline Safety Trust has done some soul searching over the years about how to engage on climate change. The board recently did some work on it with us as staff and really came to the conclusion that climate change is a public safety issue. Really, the biggest risk to public safety that pipelines may pose is climate change.
Our primary focus is always going to be on the integrity of the pipelines that run through our communities, but we do need to work to address climate change as well. These methane emissions is a way of an overlap between safety issues and climate that really is a sweet spot for us to work in. There’s a big need.
The PIPES Act of 2020 has some new provisions on methane leaks and minimizing those emissions. We’re working hard on making sure those get enacted as strongly as the congressional mandate intended them to be.
Russel: How does that work? How does the Pipeline Safety Trust work to get those types of things actually enacted in Congress? Are you guys, are you lobbying? How do you do that? What’s the mechanism?
Bill: No, we don’t lobby. There’s very few resources for lawmakers, on the public advocacy side, with any kind of pipeline expertise. When things like this are getting written, lawmakers and their staff will reach out to us just for technical assistance on the language. We do our best to represent the public interest and offer them that technical assistance they’re looking for.
Now that the bill has passed, we’re trying to offer that same kind of technical assistance from the public perspective to PHMSA. They’ll have a public meeting on the enactment, on the promulgation of these rules. We’ll sit on the panel and represent the public interest, things like that.
Russel: So you’re basically there to be a voice with that perspective in the process.
Bill: That’s right. Again, because the public is at that disadvantage — they’re not paid to do this kind of work — we’re there to represent them.
Russel: It’s interesting to me. I worked in the pipeline business and the energy business a long time before I started coming up against these kinds of issues and meeting people like yourself and having these kind of conversations.
I have found it really fascinating how that works, like how our government actually works and when it’s working well. I do think that in the world of PHMSA and pipeline safety, that we have done a pretty good job of governance in that area. I think our government actually has worked.
When you go to those meetings, at least me, I come back with some faith in the process. It’s not always smooth. There’s not always a lot of agreement and all of that, but there’s always movement.
One of the reasons it’s so dadgum slow is it’s so deliberate. There’s so much listening that’s happening to all these different perspectives. It actually makes you proud of our system. [laughs] In this day and age…
Bill: [laughs]
Russel: …that may be a lot to say. When you actually get to where the work’s being done, it’s a different experience than what’s being in the media every day.
Bill: I tend to agree with you. Of course, we’d like to see more progress happen and that progress happen faster, but the system is designed the way it is on purpose and is slow to change. I do feel like we are making steady progress, and that’s important.
Russel: The other thing I wanted to ask you about because it seems to be in the news is CO2. There’s lots of talk about climate change and the kind of projects that are out there. There’s a lot going on around CO2 capture, transportation, and sequestration. Are you guys doing anything in that domain?
Bill: We are. We are doing quite a bit of work there. We actually just released a white paper this week written by an independent pipeline engineer, Richard Kuprewicz, with Accufacts.
These tax credits came out in the infrastructure bill. They’d been in place for a while, but they were expanded in the infrastructure bill last year. All of a sudden, these big carbon capture and sequestration projects were proposed. Carbon capture and sequestration, there’s one word that’s missing out of that, and that’s transportation.
Russel: [laughs] So true.
Bill: People gloss over that part, but what does that really mean? It means that in order to make a meaningful difference, the level of infrastructure we’re going to have to have for this system means a lot of carbon dioxide pipelines crisscrossing the country.
Right now, we have very low mileage of carbon dioxide pipelines, and it hasn’t been a big priority of PHMSA to regulate those heavily because the mileage is pretty low.
A couple things, one is there was an incident in Mississippi in 2020 where there was a CO2 pipeline rupture, and it sent almost 50 people to the hospital. The asphyxiant quality of CO2 really took people down, and it surprised a lot of folks. There’s a really good article written about it that will put the fear in God in you about these pipelines. That made us sit up and take notice.
Then when you get these tax credits expanded and these projects announced, we decided we needed to take a good look and make sure that the regulations were ready to keep these pipelines safe if these are going to get built.
The white paper came out earlier this week, and we found that no, the regulations are not ready to keep us safe. We came up with a list of some common sense, new regulations that would go a long way in making these pipelines safer.
As I said, carbon dioxide is an asphyxiant. It’s heavier than air, and so it stays close to the ground. After a rupture, depending on the terrain or the weather at any given time, it can travel long distances away from the pipeline in these lethal or intoxicating concentrations.
There’s really not a lot of regulations around determining what that potential impact area is because it is different from hydrocarbons. The fact that it doesn’t ignite like other HVLs would means that you need to be looking at a new way to determine that potential impact area, and it’s probably going to involve some sophisticated modeling as opposed to a formula like we have now.
Russel: It’s a very different problem than what we currently have.
Bill: That’s right.
Russel: It’s a very different problem. When we were getting ready for the podcast, we had talked about my background, how I started out. My first job, I was an applications engineer doing CO2 applications right out of the military. I have a fair degree of knowledge.
It is an interesting challenge. Most of the existing CO2 pipelines are moving CO2 from some kind of geologic formation, and they’re using it for enhanced oil recovery, and they’re moving it as a supercritical fluid so more like a liquid than a gas.
I think what most people are looking at for the sequestration is moving it more as a gas, which there’s also issues around…I don’t know of any major, large scale pipeline moving CO2 as a gas.
Bill: No. No. I’ll say the new projects that have been proposed so far still are saying they’re going to move it as a supercritical fluid from ethanol plants is mostly what we’re seeing so far. They’re able to move larger volumes that way than gas.
One thing I’ll say is these tax credits may make it pencil out to move it as a gas as you say where it really hasn’t before, and that would be when looking at converting existing infrastructure, converting existing natural gas pipelines over to move CO2, move it as a gas. That might pencil out, and it really doesn’t, wouldn’t have penciled out before these tax credits.
Russel: What do you mean by penciled out? What does that mean?
Bill: I mean they might actually be able to make money moving CO2 as a gas in existing infrastructure where they wouldn’t before. It wouldn’t pencil out to build new pipeline and move it as a gas.
One of the reasons we’ve been looking at this is because the PHMSA regulations only regulate CO2 pipelines if they are moved as a supercritical fluid. If they’re moved as a gas or if they’re moved as a liquid, completely unregulated. They only define CO2 pipelines under their regulations as a supercritical fluid.
Russel: Interesting.
Bill: That was that sufficient up until now because like you said they’re moving it for enhanced oil recovery, one source to one destination, but we’re going to have a whole different type of carbon dioxide pipeline system, and we need to be prepared for all the different shapes and sizes it’s going to come in.
Russel: Interesting. The interesting thing to me about this is the issues related to a pipeline rupture for the three different phases of CO2 are quite different.
Bill: That’s right. Yeah. Really what you’re looking at there, and if it is a supercritical fluid, you have the possibility of a running ductile fracture. If you’ve got valves based 20 miles, you could have a pretty long running ductile fracture going and release a large amount of CO2 all at once, and that can be a pretty violent rupture, throwing pipe around, throwing shrapnel.
We would love to see some regulations around some fracture arresters as well.
Russel: That’s interesting. I have to chew on that one, Bill.
[laughter]
Russel: That made the gears in my head spin a little bit.
Bill: [laughs]
Russel: I got to chew on that one a little bit. I was more thinking about the nature of a liquid rupture versus a gas rupture. One of the things about CO2 because it’s odorless, it’s colorless, we’re all exposed to some level of CO2 all the time…
Bill: Absolutely.
Russel: …because it exists in the atmosphere. It’s inherently not a problem until it’s in such concentrations that it displaces the oxygen and you basically, you don’t know you’re being asphyxiated until you find out all of a sudden you’re out of breath and you don’t know why. That is a very different kind of risk.
I would think, and I don’t know, I’m just speculating, so don’t quote me, but I would think moving it as a gas would be inherently safer than moving it either as a liquid or as supercritical.
Bill: That’s true, but it still needs to have some base regulations in place.
Russel: Right. Sure.
Bill: Yes, the amount of gas that would release would be less or the amount of product that would be released would be less. The opportunity for those unique fracture propagations are a lot lower with gas. If you’re talking about existing natural gas pipelines and converting them, that poses its own set of safety problems though as well.
Russel: Yeah, that’s a whole different…I don’t even want to go down that rabbit hole.
Bill: [laughs]
Russel: I’d have to think about that before I actually ran down that rabbit hole because there’s all kinds of…The biggest issue with that is in most pipelines there’s some amount of water, and water and CO2 turn into carbonic acid, and they love to eat metal.
Bill: That’s right. That’s right.
Russel: Quickly too.
Bill: It’s notoriously difficult to get all of the water out of CO2. I know it’s a big focus to operators to do that. Everyone’s aware of that problem.
Russel: It’s one of the reasons they like to move CO2 as supercritical because it mitigates that problem.
Bill: Sure. We would love to see some just standard set on water in those pipelines in things like H2S. Again, the current projects moving from ethanol plants, that does tend to be a pretty pure CO2, but we’re looking to the future and all the shapes and sizes that these projects may take.
One other just really simple thing that we’d love to see is just adding odorant to these transmission lines because it is odorless. Once that rupture has settled and the dry ice has melted, you can’t see it either. Adding an odorant would let folks know there’s something dangerous in the air right now.
Russel: We odorize natural gas, but we only odorize natural gas in the utility system. We don’t odorize natural gas in the gathering and transmission systems.
Bill: That’s right. Methane disperses in the atmosphere very quickly and easily whereas CO2 does not.
Russel: We’re getting into some technical stuff here.
Bill: [laughs]
Russel: These are questions I don’t know the answers to, but I’d be curious to know how quickly methane disperses versus how quickly CO2 would disperse as a gas.
Bill: I don’t have stats on me or anything, but methane is lighter than air. CO2’s about one and a half times the weight of air. It is much harder to disperse CO2, and it does stick around a lot longer.
Russel: That makes sense. The other thing when you start talking about supercritical or liquid, when that stuff goes to atmosphere, it flashes, and it immediately converts about half to a solid and half to a gas. That expansion of that gas is several hundred fold pretty much immediately. That’s one of the reasons you get such very high concentrations of CO2 around one of those kind of situations.
When I was working in CO2 and we’d have to blow tanks down and stuff, that was things you needed to be aware of.
Bill: [laughs] Yeah. Europe has done a lot of tests on this where as we really haven’t done it as much over here. There’s some video out there of these test ruptures.
There’s one of an eight inch line, and it is incredible to see the CO2 go through those phase changes and blast out of that line, and the way it disperses around. It forms dry ice at the rupture point, and then builds up pressure again, then blasts through again, and then you see the dry ice crystals in the air, and then that melts. It’s pretty wild to see.
Russel: Yep. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. We’ll put a link on the website…
Bill: That’d be great.
Russel: …when we release the episode so people can look that. Anybody that’s listening, if you want to Google it, just go to DNV and look for dense phase CO2 test, and you’ll probably find it.
Bill, before we wrap up here, I do want to ask you a question. You’re talking to an audience that’s mostly pipeliners. It’s engineers, and technicians, and operators, and so forth that primarily listen to this. What would you want them to know or hear from you as a representative of the Pipeline Safety Trust?
Bill: It’s that, and I always try to keep this front of mind, we are all on the same team with the same goal. We may disagree on the best way to get there, but we all want zero incidents.
Nobody wants these things to happen. Nobody wants people killed, or injured, or ecosystems destroyed from pipeline incidents. It’s important that we always keep that in mind that we are all on the same team working towards the same goal.
It’s good to have a robust discussion on the various ways we can get there. One thing I can promise is that I’ll always listen and keep an open mind, and I will try to keep learning every day. My virtual door is always open if anybody wants to reach out. Let me know when I get something wrong
Russel: The other thing I would say too to the listeners is the Pipeline Safety Trust puts out an email. They put stuff out anytime there’s an incident, and then they have a regular email. I subscribe to that.
I find it really resourceful because it helps me find out about a whole lot of other things that frankly there’s no other way to know about them. We’ll link that up as well in the show notes, and if people are interested in getting on the email list, we’ll get that done.
Bill: I’m glad you brought that up. It’s a great resource. You can find it on our website, but we’ll make sure I get you a link, direct link, as well.
Russel: Bill, thanks for coming on. I’ve enjoyed the conversation. You made me scratch my head a little bit, so that’s good.
Bill: [laughs] I really enjoyed this too, Russel. Thanks so much for having me. I look forward to maybe doing it again someday.
Russel: I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of The Pipeliner’s Podcast and our conversation with Bill. 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 this podcast, you can do that by leaving us a review. We would really appreciate it. You can do that on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or wherever you happen to listen. You can also find instructions at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com.
[background music]
Russel: Finally, If you have ideas, questions, or topics you’d be interested in or if you’d like to be a guest, please let me know either on the contact us page at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening, talk to you next week.
Transcription by CastingWords