This month’s Pipeline Technology Podcast episode sponsored by Pipeline & Gas Journal features Peter Bortolin discussing ways to reduce the carbon footprint being left behind by pipeline projects and the overall oil and gas industry.

In this month’s episode, you will learn about the three key areas to reduce emissions throughout the industry, the value of renewable energy and how it is becoming more commonly used, how artificial intelligence is going to improve our consumption of energy, and ways you can lower your own carbon footprint.

Reducing Carbon Emission in Pipeline Projects: Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms

• Peter Bortolin is a professional engineer and senior project manager with over 35 years of experience currently working for Stantec. Based in Waterloo, Peter manages a team of project managers and engineers in the development and execution of energy projects in Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada. Connect with Peter on LinkedIn. Alternatively, you can email Peter at Peter.Bortolin@stantec.com.
  • Stantec provides professional consulting services in planning, engineering, architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, surveying, environmental sciences, project management, and project economics for infrastructure and facilities projects. Stantec provides services on projects around the world through over 25,000 employees operating out of more than 400 locations in North America and across offices on 6 continents internationally.
  • How can we reduce the carbon footprint of our oil and gas infrastructure? – Read the referenced blog from June 28, 2021 co-authored by Peter Bortolin and Nathan Ashcroft.
• Pipeline & Gas Journal is the essential resource for technology, industry information, and analytical trends in the midstream oil and gas industry. For more information on how to become a subscriber, visit pgjonline.com/subscribe.
  • Access Peter Bortolin’s referenced Pipeline & Gas Journal article entitled “Rethinking Practices Can Reduce Carbon Footprint for Pipeline Projects” in the June 2022 edition of the magazine.
  • Nominations are open for the 2022 Pipeline & Gas Journal Awards. Submit nominations by July 15 before the November 17 awards gala in Houston.
• API (American Petroleum Institute) represents all segments of America’s oil and natural gas industry. Its nearly 600 members produce, process, and distribute most of the nation’s energy. The industry supports millions of U.S. jobs and is backed by a growing grassroots movement of millions of Americans. API was formed in 1919 as a standards-setting organization. In their first 100 years, API has developed more than 700 standards to enhance operational and environmental safety, efficiency, and sustainability.
• AGA (American Gas Association) represents companies delivering natural gas safely, reliably, and in an environmentally responsible way to help improve the quality of life for their customers every day. AGA’s mission is to provide clear value to its membership and serve as the indispensable, leading voice and facilitator on its behalf in promoting the safe, reliable, and efficient delivery of natural gas to homes and businesses across the nation.
• Energy Transition is the ongoing process of replacing fossil fuels, mainly with renewable energy and by the efficient energy use.
• Biogas is an environmentally friendly, renewable energy source. It’s produced when organic matter, such as food or animal waste, is broken down by microorganisms in the absence of oxygen, in a process called anaerobic digestion.
• Geothermal Energy is a type of renewable energy taken from the Earth’s core. It comes from heat generated during the original formation of the planet and the radioactive decay of materials. This thermal energy is stored in rocks and fluids in the center of the earth.
• Fugitive emission is defined as 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. Fugitive emission is also known as leak or leakage.
• PipeWATCH uses high-resolution satellite images, collected daily, to monitor thousands of kilometers of pipeline networks instantly. This method detects vegetative health degradation caused by contamination from a release.
• O&M (Operations & Maintenance) is a comprehensive approach to performing pipeline tasks related to the operation and maintenance of gas and liquid pipeline systems. A robust O&M program provides personnel with the knowledge and understanding of each situation to enable them to correctly assess the situation and take corrective action.
• CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) involves the capture of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from industrial processes, such as steel and cement production, or from the burning of fossil fuels in power generation. This carbon is then transported from where it was produced, via ship or in a pipeline, and stored deep underground in geological formations.
• EOR (Enhanced Oil Recovery) entails changing the actual properties of the hydrocarbons, which further distinguishes this phase of recovery from the secondary recovery method. While waterflooding and gas injection during the secondary recovery method are used to push the oil through the well, EOR applies steam or gas to change the makeup of the reservoir.
• Pressure swing adsorption is a technique used to separate some gas species from a mixture of gases (typically air) under pressure according to the species’ molecular characteristics and affinity for an adsorbent material. It operates at near-ambient temperature and significantly differs from the cryogenic distillation commonly used to separate gases. Selective adsorbent materials (e.g., zeolites, (a/k/a molecular sieves), activated carbon, etc.) are used as trapping material, preferentially adsorbing the target gas species at high pressure. The process then swings to low pressure to desorb the adsorbed gas.
• BTU (British Thermal Unit) is a measure of the heat content of fuels or energy sources. It is the quantity of heat required to raise the temperature of one pound of liquid water by 1 degree Fahrenheit at the temperature that water has its greatest density (approximately 39 degrees Fahrenheit).

Reducing Carbon Emission in Pipeline Projects: Full Episode Transcript

Announcer:  The Pipeline Technology Podcast, brought to you by Pipeline and Gas Journal, the decision-making resource for pipeline and midstream professionals. Now, your host, Russel Treat.

Russel Treat:  Welcome to the Pipeline Technology Podcast, episode 22. On this episode, our guest is Peter Bortolin with Stantec. We’re going to talk to Peter about a recent Pipeline and Gas Journal article entitled Reducing the Carbon Footprint for Pipelines.

Peter, welcome to the Pipeline Technology Podcast.

Peter Bortolin:  Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Russel:  Before we start talking about the energy transition, maybe you could tell us a little bit about your background and how you found yourself in your current role.

Peter:  Well, I am a chemical engineer by training, but I’ve been throughout, first of all, the oil and gas industry, then the education industry, now back in the oil and gas industry, and now it’s turned into the energy industry. I’ve been around for almost 40 years now picking away at this wonderful subject here.

Russel:  [laughs] You’re dating yourself. If you’ve been doing this for 40 years, you’ve been through a cycle or two.

Peter:  I’ve been through a number of ups and downs. That’s for sure.

Russel:  I told people in this business we’re just surfers. When the surf is down, we’re paddling like crazy. When the surf is up, we’re trying to ride the waves, and I’ll get smashed on the rocks. It’s just the nature of our world.

Peter:  [laughs]

Russel:  There’s a lot of conversation going on in our business about the energy transition. I was at API pipeline a week ago, and the keynote was on decarbonization. Then, later in that week, I was at AGA. There’s a lot who talk about hydrogen, renewable gas. They’ll be good just to get someone else’s perspective on all this. Here’s my first question, is the energy transition real?

Peter:  I believe it is. The energy transition is moving away from oil and gas as a key energy solution towards more carbon-friendly sources – hydrogen, biogas, electrical, either from solar, wind, whatever. The big one out there is potentially nuclear, bringing that back on with small modular reactors.

There’s a lot going on in the energy industry, and industry is pulling up their bootstraps and getting on with the program. Kudos to the energy industry for that.

Russel:  It’s an interesting conversation. The audience to this podcast is primarily pipeliners, and there’s a great deal of skepticism about a number of the things that are being talked about.

Probably, the thing we ought to do is just walk down the list of things people are looking at and talk about what part of that’s real and near term and what part of that is more theoretical and we’ve got work to do, and I think that’d be helpful for anybody who works in our business have better understanding of that.

I’m perusing your blog where you listed seven ways that we’re going to go about reducing emissions and reducing our footprint. The first thing you said is reducing emissions. I think the word I key off of is ‘unnecessary.’ Maybe, you can talk a little bit about, what are the things that are currently viable to reduce emissions for pipeline operators?

Peter:  I like to think of this as three key areas to reduce emissions throughout the oil and gas industry and particularly pipeline industries.

The three key areas are the use of technology to reduce your emissions, to use alternative fuels and power sources, and the final one is to reduce your footprint in order to ultimately bring down the carbon emissions. I can talk about those three things. They do equate quite readily to the seven items that I’ve listed in my blog, but that boils it down to the three main topics.

Russel:  Go ahead. I’m listening. [laughs]

Peter:  Sure. Technology. There is a whole pile of technology out there, and we’ve got to use it to its maximum extent. First of all, a very obvious one, is to use electrical sources where it’s possible, stay away from using gas as a source to power actuators to do your controls and whatnot. Use electric actuated valves, that’ll help reduce fugitive emissions.

Some obvious ones are tested material of valve packing, use some better materials that are readily available now to reduce the emissions coming out there. Flare systems. There’s a lot of new technology on flares. Reducing the amount of carbon emitted from the flare. Use the latest technology.

One of the things that is really interesting coming out of the new digital area is all the advances in digital technology. One that I would like to specify is something that Stantec has come up with but there are many other options out there. It’s called PipeWATCH. PipeWATCH is a satellite-based monitoring program which allows us to inspect pipeline right-of-ways from space. That’s really interesting because we have a number of satellites out there, and they pass over pipelines once every four hours or something like that.

They could monitor emissions from outer space. That avoids a lot of unnecessary plane flights for monitoring, or helicopters, or even vehicles traveling out to the right-of-way looking for emissions. It also identifies emissions right away so that we would know if there’s a potential leak out there. We’ll know it right away and be able to respond. It’s just some ideas.

Russel:  I think there’s a lot bound up in this. When I was at AGA a couple weeks ago, I sat next to a company that has specialized compression equipment for catching vented gas off of gas pipeline systems. There’s a lot of things we have to do when we’re doing normal O&M activities around gas pipelines where we have to blow that pipeline down, get the pressure off of it so we can do the O&M activity.

Historically, we just vent that gas to the atmosphere. There’s techniques to capture that gas and then reinject it elsewhere.

Peter:  You either reinject it or use it as a fuel source within your pump station or a compressor station.

Russel:  Yeah, but the key thing being there’s a lot of things that we do through the normal course of operations that by making some changes we can eliminate those sources of emissions. All that had cost associated with it, but ultimately there’s a lot to be said about capturing that gas and getting it back into the system.

Peter:  There’s a cost, but there’s also a potential revenue stream in there. In addition to the obvious revenues by using the gas, there’s carbon credits that are coming available. In Canada, we’re starting a carbon credit program. I don’t know about the States, but I imagine you are, as well. Many countries in Europe are using carbon credits. That’s one source of revenue that’s readily available to us. It could be from venting down pipelines, capturing vapors off of tanks as well. A lot of technology out there that’s available to us.

Russel:  There’s some interesting stuff being done out in West Texas where people are taking flare gas and using it to generate power to do Bitcoin mining. They have trailers and they run around. I don’t know how sustainable that is as a business, but I do give people A+ for creativity.

Peter:  With Bitcoin mining, you also generate a lot of heat with all those computers going full stream. You can use that heat and use that as an alternative source of energy. You never know. There’s lots of things out there.

Russel:  That’s right. There’s lots of creativity.

The second thing you mentioned is carbon capture technologies. I know a fair amount about CO2 because I’ve worked in that space. The question I always have about carbon capture, they talk about CCS (carbon capture and storage). It ought to be CCTS (carbon capture transportation and storage) because, generally, the places where we make carbon dioxide are not the places geologically where we can sequester carbon dioxide. We’ve got to transport it from the point of origin to the point of sequestration.

What is the state of that market presently? Are there any projects that are operating at scale or soon to be operating at scale? I know there’s been a lot of fairly substantial pilot projects, but I’m not aware of anything at scale that’s not enhanced oil recovery.

Peter:  That’s a good question. I know there’s a number of projects in Canada. In Saskatchewan, there’s a major carbon capture project going on in the Weyburn area in Saskatchewan.

I believe they have started a carbon capture near Edmonton, Alberta. I’m not quite sure what stage that plant is at. Carbon capture is out there. It’s probably going to take a lot to make it an economically viable program but the technology is definitely there.

Russel:  The technology’s there. There are projects that are operating, but I don’t know of anything occurring at scale. I know that Denbury built a green pipeline. They extended their pipeline from Mississippi into East Texas with the idea that they could capture carbon off of a lot of the petrochemical facilities that run along the Gulf Coast between, more or less, New Orleans and Houston.

There’s certainly a lot there that they could capture. That’s an EOR project. The justification there is EOR. There’s discussion about whether carbon credits will be applied to EOR. Do they give credit for sequestering carbon dioxide in the EOR field versus just sequestering it?

I don’t know. I find all that interesting.

Peter:  True, true.

Russel:  What about renewable energy? What are the sort of things we’re doing there?

Peter:  I think that is the way of the future for the pipeline industry is the use of renewable energy, whether it’s for operating valves, plants, or what. It has potential for a substantial reduction in the pipeline industry.

When you look at the pipeline industry, a lot of energy is used in either compression or pumping of all the fluids to be transported. How exactly do you get that energy? Well, you look, first of all, is there an electrical grid nearby? That’s one option. Many pipeline companies throughout North America are now utilizing electric pumps, electric compressors instead of gas-driven compressors.

When you look at the gas-driven compressors, maybe there isn’t an electrical grid near you. Maybe there’s a landfill site possibly near you. Why don’t you think about using biogas as your energy source? There’s many alternatives. Biogas is a net zero energy source, so that’s a good one. Solar and wind can power your electrical facilities. Either the compressor station, or a pump station, or even a remote valve site. That’s one option that you can use.

Something else that is readily available is geothermal. Is there an active geothermal site in the area? Just drill down, get some geothermal energy, and bring it up. Whether it’s enough geothermal energy to power your facility or just enough geothermal to heat up the buildings or do whatever you need to run the buildings from a day-to-day point of view.

There are many alternatives here that are entirely possible.

Russel:  I’m going to ask a tough question, maybe. When I think of about liquids pipeline and I think about the kind of power required to run their mainline pumps and their booster pumps, to me, that’s not something that is easily done with wind or solar or any of that because the amount of power consumed is out of line with what you could reasonably generate.

Peter:  This is absolutely true. 

Russel:  Not to mention, you tend to need that stuff pumping when the other stuff’s not working.

Peter:  That’s where the electrical grid comes into play. Is there an electrical grid near you? Is that readily available to you?

Russel:  I’ve done a little bit of work around biogas, particularly gas off of landfills. I don’t know enough to know. Can I get enough gas off of something like that to do something meaningful, or is that reliable?

Russel:  How reliable is that supply?

Peter:  It’s quite reliable, but it is low volume. It offers the opportunity to substitute for at least a portion of the natural gas that you would use. It is a potential green energy solution. Instead of using natural gas all the time, use 20 percent biogas mixed with it.

Russel:  Just about everybody I talked to at AGA that’s operating is like, “Yep, we’ve got a lot of RNG projects on the board. There’s a lot of them coming down the road.”

Peter:  Oh, yes.

Russel:  I think the big issue there is the need to deal with the gas stream and clean it up before you put it into the utility network. That’s all technology that’s well understood, but there’s probably a lot of opportunity to improve it and drop the price point.

Peter:  Yes, I would say there’s a lot of opportunities. I was just at a biogas conference earlier this week, actually. A number of companies were showcasing their new technology, whether it’s pressure swing adsorption, membrane technology. I think there’s water wash technology out there. There’s bound to be more technologies coming.

Russel:  All that stuff has been around for a long time. Not generally quite to this particular business case, but the technology itself has been around for a long time.

Peter:  That’s true, but it’s getting better and more efficient, so I think there’s a potential opportunity out there.

Russel:  Those gas streams are normally low flow and low pressure. You’ve got to do something with the gas beyond just treating it to make it usable in a distribution network. Is that correct?

Peter:  That is correct. Typically, it could be up to 40 percent carbon dioxide and then 60 percent methane, and then a whole host of other impurities.

You definitely have to get rid of the carbon dioxide. Then, you could turn into liquefied carbon dioxide. A lot of companies are doing that right now and selling that off as a new revenue stream or releasing it to the atmosphere as a lower greenhouse gas than methane.

There’s opportunities, but you’re right. It is low flow. You have to bring it up to usable pressure. It’s low volume. However, it is a sustainable volume.

Russel:  It’s predictable, too. Once you have it, you’re pretty much going to have it for quite a long time.

Peter:  Correct.

Russel:  That’s certainly important in this conversation, as well.

What about geothermal? I know that in some places like Iceland where a big part of their power generation is geothermal.

Peter:  Geothermal has great advantages. If there is sufficient geothermal, you can use it to actually power a facility. If you have just enough geothermal, you can use it for heating your facility. There’s potential.

Russel:  Here’s the big conversation. We have a lot of conversations at AGA about hydrogen. Lots of people are looking at hydrogen. What are the implications of blending hydrogen into natural gas? What are the implications of moving hydrogen into our current pipeline networks and so forth? Where do you think we are in terms of the actual use of hydrogen?

I’m going to ask that question first globally because I know Europe’s way ahead of most of us. Then, in terms of North America, where are we?

Peter:  Personally, I’m not an expert in hydrogen. I have heard a lot of technologies out there, so I could tell you what I’ve heard to date. I’m sure there are a number of your listeners who will probably correct me as I go ahead.

From what I heard, we can probably get around five percent injection into the pipeline systems for now, and that is primarily due to the integrity of the steel pipelines. We could move it up, but I’m not quite sure what the technology is and what the material technology is right now. I heard they’re aiming for up to 20 percent, perhaps more. One of the challenges is that once you have the hydrogen blended into the natural gas stream, you have to use it. The end user, the houses, the industry, the residential areas, they have to use it in their stove tops, in their ovens, in their furnaces, and the burners are not set up to do that, as of yet. At five percent burners can work. If you go beyond that, then they have to retrofit all the burners. So, I think it’s definitely coming, but there’s still a lot of work to do. I think people are still feeling this industry out and figuring out what is the optimal concentration of hydrogen that they can put in the lines.

Russel:  Peter, I’m like you. I’m far from an expert around hydrogen. I went to a number of presentations at AGA about hydrogen. There were a number of things that I found really interesting that I didn’t know. One was that the higher concentrations of hydrogen can cause embrittlement in the pipelines and lead to acceleration of integrity issues, and that it doesn’t take very long with the higher level of exposure for those things to occur. It’s a matter of a couple or three weeks not a matter of how long.

Once I get that higher concentration in, I do the damage pretty quickly, and then the damage is done. While there is some good work going on to understand that, I don’t think anybody’s actually able to sit down and run numbers and say, “This is what it does to the O&M cost by existing pipelines.” Even if it’s five percent, there’s an impact.

Peter:  I’m sure there is. A small hydrogen molecule can get into the spaces in between the metal molecules and work its way out, so hydrogen embrittlement is a big, big factor.

Russel:  I’ve had the conversation about appliances and that everything you said that lines up with what I’ve heard, but there was also another presentation about, “Well, what is the commercial aspects of using hydrogen,” because we don’t have tariffs. We don’t have pricing. We don’t have measurement standards, contracts, none of that.

There’s a whole commercial construct that has to be built around this as well, so that these companies can actually understand how to work this into their business practices.

Peter:  I did have a conversation with a utility company a while ago – I think it’s about a year ago    about that. It’s quite interesting because when you put hydrogen into a natural gas stream, you’re lowering the BTU rating of the natural gas.

Russel:  Hydrogen is about one third of the BTU of natural gas.

Peter:  Are you selling your product by volume, or are you selling it by BTU? I asked the question, and the utility company told me that, “We’re still selling it by volume. We’ll still keep the same price.”

I said, “Whoa. Wait a second. That doesn’t sound quite fair to the end user.”

Russel:  What’s the price of a BTU of hydrogen versus the price of a BTU of methane, right?

Peter:  That’s true.

Russel:  Then, yeah. There’s all kinds of questions that mount up around all that. The other question is, if I’m running a burner tip, and I now have a gas that the BTU has dropped even though I’m getting the same volume of gas out the burner tip. I’m going to have to run the burner longer to boil my water and cook my dinner.

Peter:  True.

Russel:  What’s the net gain in emissions improvement through all of that? I don’t think we know the answers to all those questions yet.

Peter:  No.

Russel:  Certainly hydrogen is coming like a freight train, so people are trying to figure all this out.

Peter:  It is.

Russel:  My theory, and this is just based on conversations I’ve had. It’s not based on any research I’ve done or anything. My theory is hydrogen’s going to make sense where I’m doing green hydrogen at a point of use where I’m making my own hydrogen.

Peter:  Personally, I agree but I know that blue hydrogen and grey hydrogen is out there. I think the bang for its buck is with green hydrogen, especially for climate. 

Russel:  When you start doing it that way, then there can be, “I have a large power need at this place. If I can do renewable, make hydrogen and my need for energy is large but for short periods of time,” then I could actually see the economics of that working. It’s interesting.

You had one other that you had in your list, which was embracing innovative technologies. You already mentioned what you guys do at PipeWATCH. What do you think are some of the other things that people might start to embrace?

Peter:  I think artificial intelligence. I think that’s going to go a long way. Finding the optimal point, from a revenue point of view, from a carbon emissions point of view. Finding the right fuel mix to do that will come out of artificial intelligence. I think that’s the big area.

Russel:  I certainly think that there’s a lot of things that we could do to improve our consumption of energy through the application of artificial intelligence, particularly around running pumps on large pipeline systems. There’s lots of opportunity to improve things, particularly if you can implement industrial process robotics to take the human element out. We can’t spend the human resource to constantly be tuning the power consumption in the pumps, but we can certainly do that through algorithms. I think that’s a big opportunity right there.

Peter:  I’d like to also talk about reducing your footprint.

Russel:  Absolutely. Let’s talk about that.

Peter:  That’s another area that I feel is quite important in the reduction of carbon emissions area. Reducing your footprint. When you take up a lot of land use, you take the agricultural use out of business. There’s many opportunities to reduce your footprint. One of which is to build upwards instead of outwards.

Can you stack your facilities and then keep green space available? When you’re looking at a pipeline facility, look at it from a holistic point of view. You’ve got roads coming into pipeline facilities. Do they need to be built out of pavement or can you use some of the trees that you have to take down to build the pump station and use it as part of your road? The vehicles that you drive there. Can you use electric fuel vehicles? Is that available to you? Can you use a transit form, a bus or a rail or something else, to get you to the site rather than individual cars?

These are all things, even though they sound small, maybe insignificant to a big pipeline facility, but they do have a definite impact on your total emissions of the facility.

Russel:  Certainly, one of the big things we do in pipelining is drive.

Peter:  True.

Russel:  There’s lots of interest in reducing miles driven, just because of the operational cost of all that. There’s a whole conversation you could have around that, for sure.

I want to ask you another question about footprint. A lot of what we’re talking about here is CO2. There’s methane emission issues, as well. Those are distinct, but the CO2 emissions, one of the things we can do to help reduce CO2 is to plant things that are green and grow.

Peter:  That’s right.

Russel:  How does that play into this whole conversation? That’s one of the things that comes up for me often as you’re talking about all of this.

Peter:  Reducing your footprint gives you more space to plant things.

Russel:  If you can take 100 acres and instead of building on 100 acres, build on 25 and use the others as green space, then you’ve got an offset.

Peter:  That’s correct.

Russel:  That makes sense. This is how I’d like to conclude the conversation. I’m going to tell you where I’m at with all of this. I’d like to hear your response.

I’m a big climate change skeptic. Not so much is the climate changing or not, but what is the impact that man is having on the change in the climate. I’m a big skeptic around all of that. That being said, when I reflect back to what the conversation was in the ’70s about clean water and getting all the trash and chemicals and everything out of the lakes. There was a huge emphasis on water treatment plants and waste treatment plants and different kinds of manufacturing facilities and their effluence and getting those things cleaned up before they were discharged in the waterways.

The conversation then was not unlike the conversation we’re having now about CO2 emissions. What I wonder is, is that analogous or is it something different? Does that question make sense? I know I didn’t frame that as a question. I put it together as a premise. I’d like to hear your response to all that.

Peter:  I feel that climate change is happening. I see it very prevalent in Canada. Our northern portions of our country are becoming warmer. We’re flooding at a much higher rate than we have in the past. The overall climate, well, it is getting warmer. That might be a plus for Canada [laughs]. However, it has some very serious implications.

One of the things is we’re seeing more severe weather here in Canada. I am a believer in climate change. Regardless, whether climate change is real or not, the energy transition is happening but pipelines are here to stay for a long time.

We need pipelines, not only for oil and gas, potentially for hydrogen, or another fluid that could potentially substitute hydrogen. Pipelines are definitely needed. There’s many opportunities to use technology, to use different fuels to reduce your footprint, to make it a carbon-friendly, lower-emission industry. As I said at the beginning, the industry is going in the right direction. Now, we just have to get the governments onside. Get the regulations all in place. Get the new revenue stream of carbon credits all in place. Then, we’re all set.

Russel:  Sounds easy if you say it fast, Peter.

Peter:  I’ll say it even faster.

Russel:  I generally, on these podcasts, don’t get into political conversations. Climate change can very quickly become a political conversation. You can argue about whether or not we’re having climate change or whether or not climate change is man-made versus related to something that’s way outside of our control. You can look at these long-term geologic cycles and on, and on, and on.

What I tend to focus on is we, as operators, should be prudent operators. Prudent operators should minimize their impact and do those things necessary to minimize their impact. Minimize the impact to the land, minimize the impact to the stakeholders, minimize the impact to the air, the water, all that stuff.

To me, if you can reframe this conversation in your head about what we’re really talking about here is minimizing our negative impact, trying to increase our positive impact to the communities that we serve, I think that’s something that we can all get behind. Certainly, you’ve got a great list of things that we all ought to be thinking about. As we’re looking at projects, these are things we need to be looking at.

Peter:  True. We’re all part of the same community. Let’s make that community better.

Russel:  We’re all living on the same spaceship, right?

Peter:  That’s right.

Russel:  Listen, I appreciate you coming on the podcast. It’s been great to talk to you. If somebody wants to get in touch with you and find out more about what Stantec is doing in this domain, how might they reach out to you?

Peter:  I would suggest reaching out to me by email.

Russel:  For those that are interested, you can go to the website and go find this episode. You can click on the profile picture for Peter. It will take you to his page. All his contact information will be loaded up on the website. That would be a good way to find him and reach out to him.

[background music]

Peter:  Good.

Russel:  Thanks again, Peter. I’ve enjoyed it.

Peter:  Thank you. Bye.

Russel:  I hope you enjoyed this month’s episode of the Pipeline Technology Podcast and our conversation with Peter.

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Transcription by CastingWords