In this episode of the Pipeliners Podcast, host Russel Treat speaks with Joshua Ott of Crazeweld about safely purging pipelines.

Joshua shares his journey to developing innovative tools for gas purging, including his air mover device, and discusses the challenges and best practices for safely handling gas purging during pipeline operations.

The conversation offers insights into standardizing tools and practices across the industry to improve safety and efficiency in these critical processes.

Safely Purging Gas Pipelines Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms

• Joshua Ott is the CEO of CW Mechanical and SafePurge. Connect with Joshua on LinkedIn.
  • CrazeWeld is a veteran-owned company dedicated to providing safer purging tools for the field. Specializing in the production of the SafePurge Air Mover, CrazeWeld addresses the need for reliable, high-quality devices designed to prevent dangerous incidents in refineries, chemical plants, pipelines, and other industrial settings. The SafePurge Air Mover is manufactured in Ohio, thoroughly tested, and insured to ensure safe and efficient operations.
• Air Mover: A device used to create negative pressure to pull gases and air mixtures away from an area where welding or other hot work is performed. It’s a safety tool to help purge pipelines during gas removal operations.
• Positive Pressure: The use of pressure to push gases out of a pipeline. In the context of the conversation, using positive pressure during gas purging caused equipment failure and a major outage, highlighting its risks.
• Abandonment: A pipeline operation where a section of pipe is permanently taken out of service. During abandonment, it is necessary to safely purge any remaining gases from the pipeline.
• Stoppling Equipment: Equipment used to temporarily block or isolate a section of pipeline for maintenance or repairs. It is noted that stoppling equipment is not always 100% reliable in preventing gas from entering areas where hot work is being done.
• Hot Work: Work involving welding or other tasks that generate heat or sparks, which can ignite flammable gases if not properly managed. The conversation emphasizes the need for purging gas to ensure safety during hot work.
• Negative Pressure: The process of using suction to draw gases away from a work area, as opposed to using positive pressure. Negative pressure is achieved with devices like air movers, ensuring gases are safely removed from pipelines during purging.
• Purging: The process of removing unwanted gases or air from a pipeline. Purging can refer to either removing air from a line before introducing gas or removing gas from a line to safely perform work. The term can be confusing, as it is used in multiple contexts.
• Purge Stand: A tool designed to assist in purging air out of pipelines before gas is introduced. It helps ensure safety during operations by meeting company-specific standards, such as maintaining a specific purge height.
• Venturi Principle: A principle that describes how fluid speed increases as it passes through a narrow section of a pipe, creating a pressure difference. The air mover operates using this principle to create suction and pull gases out of pipelines.
• Test Port: A connection point on a pipeline where a gas sample can be taken to ensure 100% gas is flowing through the line, especially during the purging process.
• Launching and Receiving PIGs: Operations involving inserting or retrieving pipeline inspection gauges (PIGs) from a pipeline. Air movers can be used in these operations to safely vent gases from the PIG launcher/receiver.
• PIG (Pipeline Inspection Gauge): A device used to inspect or clean the interior of a pipeline. The process of launching or receiving PIGs requires careful gas management, often using an air mover to ensure safety.
• Office of Pipeline Safety (OPS): The U.S. federal agency responsible for overseeing the safe transportation of natural gas, hazardous liquids, and other materials through pipelines. In the conversation, Joshua mentions contacting the OPS about purging practices and their regulations regarding welding near gas.
• National Standards: Refers to widely accepted guidelines or best practices for pipeline operations and safety that are recognized at a national level. The conversation highlights that, in gas purging, there isn’t a national standard, leading to variability in practices across companies.
• Company Standards: Refers to individual gas companies’ internal rules and procedures that govern how they conduct specific operations, such as purging. Joshua mentions that gas companies have different standards for operations like purge height, which can vary significantly from one company to another.
• Back-pressure: The pressure exerted backward into a system, often caused by obstructions or resistance to flow. It’s mentioned when discussing how purging operations can affect gas pressure and safety.
• Vent Line (Purge Line): A pipe or hose used to safely release gases (like natural gas) from the pipeline to the atmosphere during purging. The size and position of the vent line are crucial for safely managing gas flow.
• Combustible Range: The range of gas concentrations in which a gas can ignite or explode when mixed with air. Joshua mentions that gas can be dangerous within this range, highlighting the importance of controlling gas concentration during purging.
• Oxidizers: Substances that can cause or contribute to the combustion of other materials. Oxygen, mentioned as a concern during gas purging, is a common oxidizer that can increase the risk of ignition in pipelines.

Safely Purging Gas Pipelines Full Episode Transcript

Russel Treat:

Welcome to the “Pipeliners Podcast,” episode 358, sponsored by EnerSys Corporation, providers of POEMS, the pipelines operations excellence management systems, operations and compliance software for the pipeline operator to address safety program management, control room management, and field operations. Find out more about POEMS at enersyscorp.com.

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Announcer:

The Pipeliners Podcast, where professionals, bubba geeks, and industry insiders share their knowledge and experience about technology, projects, and pipeline operations.

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Announcer: Now your host, Russel Treat.

Russel:

Thanks for listening to the podcast. I appreciate you taking the time and to show the appreciation, we give away a customized Yeti tumbler to one listener every episode. This week, our winner is Tony Gautreau with SCADA Integrators and Services. To learn how you can win this signature prize, stick around till the end of the episode.

This week, we’ll speak to Joshua Ott with Crazeweld, and we’re going to talk about safely purging pipelines. Joshua, welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast.

Joshua Ott: Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate this opportunity.

Russel: I want the listeners to know that Joshua is a very creative entrepreneur. He has figured out how to create an ad hoc sound recording studio right outside his house. If you want to know more about how he did that, you can call him and ask him, so how’s that?

Joshua:

I give credit to Ford F-350, I’ll tell you that.

[laughter]

Russel: They make an excellent recording studio, don’t they?

Joshua: Yeah. They don’t even know it.

Russel: For anybody that’s going to be on a podcast and has dogs and/or young kids, then here is an intelligent man plowing the ground for the rest of us. That’s good. Look, Joshua, I asked you to come on and talk about gas purging and specifically safely gas purging. Before we dive into that, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up becoming a gas purging guru?

Joshua:

It came about of an incident that happened for a gas company that I was working for, where we were doing an abandonment situation. We were trying to draw the gases out to get zero percent gas. Some things were done wrong. There was some human error in there.

They used a positive pressure to try to get that gas out, and it caused some equipment to fail. Long story short, it caused a slag of air to go into the main line, which then caused a 2100 house outage in northern Ohio in October, which is not a good deal. An outage itself, that’s bad for any gas company, let alone one that’s in the start of winter and for four days.

Some of the customers were out for four days, and it led me to look for a device which we call an air mover. It led me to try to look for that device that I knew of and that I had homemade myself. A lot of other welders, stoppler guys had these homemade devices that they were using, and I tried to find one on the market and I couldn’t.

I had a hard time and I figured, now was the time to develop what I thought was the best design and try to get it out there. That’s how I fell into trying to tackle safely purging, was on the abandonment side of of gas purging.

Russel: Are you coming at this from a welder’s perspective, in terms of you were doing that kind of work? How did you get exposed to this particular…what were you doing at the gas company, where you were involved with this near miss or this incident?

Joshua:

I’ve been a welder for about 24 years. I didn’t start my career in pipeline. I worked in different industries, and I didn’t know of an air mover until I started pipelining. The air mover, basically, for a welder, is used to draw gas and air mixture away from where you’re going to be doing hot work. If you can picture doing an abandonment, then you have to isolate that abandonment.

Once you cut that open, you can’t go home until that’s capped off. That line has to be capped off. A lot of times we’re faced with…I’m going to say, a very lot of times, your stoppling equipment isn’t 100 percent. If you’re using a valve, a valve isn’t 100 percent. I’ve been there. I’ve had very scary situations happen to me.

We’re basically using the air mover, standard tubal air compressor that you can hook up to an air mover, and you’re pulling using negative pressure. You’re pulling those gasses and air mixture away from where you need to do hot work, so you can cap that line off and go home at the end of the night.

Russel: This is an interesting conversation for me because this is new. I know enough about welding to have a very basic notional understanding but never have done that kind of work and certainly haven’t done that work in dangerous environments. What you’re getting at is this idea of moving gases away from where you’re sparking an arc. If you’re a welder, you know about this.

Joshua:

There’s many different ways to tackle it. A lot of it comes with experience. It’s hard to standardize the situation that these welders are put in. When I first started trying to market my air mover, I contacted the Office of Pipeline Safety.

I was told that if there’s gas present in a ditch or a place of hot work, that a welder was not allowed to strike up and weld. I said, “They’re doing it every day.”

Russel: [laughs]

Joshua: I’ve been there. Like I said, when you isolate that line, you’re not going home until that’s capped off.

Russel: That’s super-true. If you’re in a situation where you’re unable to get 100 percent assurance that you’ve got all the gas out of the ditch and you’re keeping it out of the ditch, then you still have to do the weld.

Joshua: There’s guys that like to light it.

Russel: I’m going to ask you this question, but I don’t want you to answer it. I can just imagine there’s been a lot of times where you’re in the ditch and would have rather not struck the arc but needed to do it so you get the work done and go home.

Joshua: A welding rod is about, what, 12 to 14 inches long. If you can picture, there’s been times when the end of that rod was just shaking [laughs] because my nerves were going a little bit. That goes away in time. [laughs]

Russel: It’s an interesting point. It’s also very interesting too that this comes from your direct experience. Talk to us a little bit about purging gas out of a line versus putting gas into a line. How are those operations different? How are they historically done?

Joshua:

They’re two separate, totally different operations. It gets confusing when we start talking about purging. That term gets thrown out a lot. It gets tossed around. It can mean multiple different things.

Doing trade shows around the country, trying to get my product out there, I talk to some people that say, “No, we only purge with nitrogen. I’m not going to talk to you anymore.”

I try to say I understand that there’s definitely situations that it’s better to purge with nitrogen, but there’s some situations that can be easily handled and cost-effective to do it in a way that you’re using an air mover. You’re using that negative pressure to draw the gases out.

When you’re gassing in, if you’re putting in a new line to a subdivision or just a new home or that you have a repair where a backhoe tooth goes in and hits a line and we have to isolate that and repair it, we now have to get that slug of air out. Purging can mean that you’re purging that slug of air out too. Basically, your intention is to get 100 percent gas in the line.

It gets really confusing when you just use term purging. You got to know the context of the operation to know which one you’re really talking about.

Russel: Putting gas into a line that you’re hooking up for the first time can be just as risky as taking gas out of a line that you’re trying to abandon.

Joshua:

Our second tool that we started developing, it was for a local gas company. They had an incident where they blew a whole house up, basically, in southern Ohio. There was a lot of error. There were things that went wrong. There was some human error involved.

What happened, they released gas, in a gas mixture, into the soffit of a home. By the time they were able to get it shut down, it lit from the inside. It basically burned that house down, very quickly.

We were contacted to see if our…At the time, we only made the air mover. We were asked if that air mover would help in this situation. I said, “No. It does the exact opposite, where it’s trying to pull the gases out, but hey, let’s talk about this. It seems like you’re in the need of a new tool.”

The gas company — I’m not mentioning any names on purpose because that’s not important here — they had a standard to use what they call a purge stand. It was very generic in their standards. Frankly, it was very…I wouldn’t call it stupid, but I’m going to say it was kind of stupid, the drawing that I was provided to…”Hey, this is in our standard.”

I took that to the drawing board. I worked with them, back and forth, for like eight months to design the most user-friendly purge stand, easy to hook up and get the total outcome while also hitting all their standards.

I do want to touch on that. All gas companies have minor tweaks and differences to their standards in the way they do things. It’s just the nature of us as humans. You go in Ohio. You see how they’re purging. You go down in Texas. They do it totally different. You go up to California. They do it…

[crosstalk]

Russel:

It’s one of those practices, A, that’s never really been standardized and…

[crosstalk]

Russel: …every company has had to develop its own practice for how to do it. At least not to my knowledge has there ever been an effort across all the gas companies to standardize that particular operation.

Joshua: There’s definitely not a national standard. I gave a talk at…In Tempe, Arizona. Shoot. It’s not going to come to me in the spur of the moment, the event.

Russel: That’s not important.

Joshua:

I gave a talk. That was one of the talking points, was standardizing the way that we’re doing this across the board, as opposed to…We’re presenting a tool. Our main point is that we’re trying to standardize even inside the company.

If you have a standardized tool, as opposed to this guy having his homemade little setup that he’s got…The valves are in a certain location. It unfolds. It packs up a different way. It’s stored different. If you have two different tools and you have employees that are coming and going from different crews from time to time…

We’re trying to standardize the tool itself to make it easier to standardize the operation. Does that make sense?

Russel:

This is a really interesting conversation. I think this will resonate with pipeliners all across the board. When you start getting to very specific use cases — this is a very specific use case — and you can standardize that performance across a broad group of people doing the work, you can improve safety. You can get a material lift in your safety performance by doing that.

That’s really what you’re going at. If I have a standard way of doing this and everybody in my company does it the same way or everybody in my region, across all companies, does it the same way, then we can have that performance, in terms of safety performance, improve.

Joshua:

Not just standardizing the process, but using a standardized tool that the shut-off valve is in the same location. If this guy over here is on vacation so this lady over here fills in for them, they have the same exact tool that they’re working with. They know how to use it. It covers all the key points in their standards.

When I say that, I’m just going to give an example of above-ground purge height standard. I see it every gas company that we talk to. They have an above-ground purge height standard, ranging anywhere from six to nine feet. It ranges from company to company, but they all have one. I’m going to say that a majority of the time, that standard is not met.

Russel: Interesting.

Joshua: What we try to do in this tool, we had the time to sit and work with this gas company. The kit that we have has enough piping in it to get that above-ground purge height every time.

Russel:

Interesting. What are some of the use cases? Actually, I want to talk about the theory of operation of your device, what it actually does. I’ll say this. When we talked before, as we were prepping to get on this podcast and do the recording, you were explaining to me what it does.

Frankly, I couldn’t get a picture in my mind until I went to your website and took a look at your video. Then, all of a sudden, it made a huge amount of sense. I’m going to try to explain it because I’m more of a layman. Maybe that’s helpful. I don’t know. You can give me a grade on how good a job.

Basically, you have a device that operates on a Venturi principle. Basically, you take air coming from an air compressor and send it through a device that causes that air to swirl. Then you have another connection into the device where the air is swirling that goes down into the pipeline.

Joshua: No.

Russel: Have I got that right?

Joshua: [laughs] No.

Russel:

No? Of course not.

[laughter]

Russel: Once again, the podcast guru demonstrates his ignorance.

Joshua:

With the air mover, what is happening is there’s a positive connection with the air mover to the pipeline, for one. You have to have an open end in order for this to work. If you just put a threadolet and welded a threadolet on top of a pipe and didn’t drill a hole or, actually, if you drilled a hole and just had it there and ran it, it wouldn’t really do anything. It wouldn’t really draw.

It’s when you have an open end further down. You have to have incoming air coming in. It’s traveling through the pipe. It’s picking up that residual gases that are there. It’s pulling it up. Let’s back up a little bit.

When that air mover is attached to the pipeline, and you connect your incoming air from a compressor, so that is connected to the tool, when that airflow goes up, it creates a negative pressure on the bottom side of the air mover.

It’s going to pull the gases and the air in the pipe up as long as you have the air inlet. It’s a Venturi, it’s the same principle that makes airplanes fly.

Russel: Right. I went to your website as we were sitting here talking. I was going to pull it up so I could look at it again. I would say that if you don’t understand how this operates, go to Joshua’s website, it’s crazeweld.com, and look at SafePurge video and you’ll see how this device works and what it does. It’s really quite simple…

Joshua: It is.

Russel: …in terms of what it does. I will say this, having done this sort of thing before, simplicity is never easy to achieve.

Joshua: Sure.

Russel: We’ve talked a little bit about evacuating a pipe. How would you use this to fill a pipe?

Joshua:

With the purge stand tool, that’s where we’re trying to get the unwanted air out, so we can have 100 percent gas. You have to have a person at every purge point. Say you’re going to gas up, you put a whole new line into a subdivision, and you have five houses down at the cul de sac that are going to get gas. You introduce the gas to that line.

Everything’s installed all the way to the meters. You introduce gas there, and now what you have to do is you have to go to each purge point and you hook up the tool, which you can use different types of connection points. Our tooling comes with a brass quick connect, to try to ease and speed up, expedite this process, and easeability of clicking in.

You connect to the line right at the meter, and that’s where you’re going to purge it. Above that controlled shut-off where you’re releasing the air-gas mixture to the atmosphere, you’re going to have a test port right there. That’s where you’re measuring.

Once you have 100 percent gas flowing…because the test port is taking a sample to make sure that’s coming through there. Once you have 100 percent gas at that point, then you shut that down, you take the tool to the next…and you can just pick it up. You pick it up, walk it to the next house, and hook it up, and do the same thing at each point until you get 100 percent gas. That’s how things are done.

Russel: It sounds really simple.

Joshua: It really is. I’ll tell you, I’m 42 years old. The air mover has been around longer than I’ve been alive.

Russel: Yeah, right.

Joshua: It wasn’t a eureka moment on my part. My tool was built out of necessity of trying to create an easy-to-use air mover tool. It wasn’t anything I developed myself. I can’t take credit for that. I just can take credit for trying to make the tool that is the easiest to use.

Russel: Sure. What about applications for launching and receiving PIGs?

Joshua:

If you’re going to do PIG launching operations, if you can picture a launcher that you’re going to open the door to, and you’re going to insert your PIGs or receive PIGs, you can put the air mover on top. If you have a port on the top, you can screw with positive connection. You can screw the air mover in and you can run it.

As long as there’s nothing open, like I said earlier, it’s not going to do anything. It’s just running. It’s just doing nothing. It’s just blowing air within itself.

As soon as you open the launcher door, you have immediately a fresh air coming into the launcher, and it’s pulled up through the air mover, and it’s taking anything bad that’s in there up and out, which is basically eliminating the workers from being hit with anything that’s in that pipeline. That’s how we’ve seen it in…

[crosstalk]

Russel: We’ve got the same issue on the receiving side too, as well. It made you open the door. It’s the same thing. If you’ve never, experienced opening a pig trap, it’s probably one of the more significant things we do as pipeline operators, is launch and receive pigs. There’s a lot that can go wrong. What should operators know about your tools?

Joshua: What should they know about the tools?

Russel: Maybe you’ve covered it. Air movement is important in the domain. You’ve focused on creating something that’s portable, simple, and reliable and meets all the typical gas company specs. [laughs]

Joshua: You hit me with a question I [laughs] …You stumped me. I don’t know how to answer that.

Russel:

That’s fair enough. I guess, one of the things for me…I don’t work in this domain. I’ve never worked around welding in this capacity. This is all new to me. What I’m trying to do is I’m trying to translate this conversation so that pipeliners understand why this is important to know about.

My takeaway in this conversation would be, number one, that if you’re putting gas into pipes, if you’re taking gas out of pipes, you need a way to do that safely. The typical way to do that is to use an air mover. The quicker and easier that device is to use, the more likely it is to be used and used properly. That’s one of my takeaways.

The other thing that you’ve said is that, at least in your experience, you’re aware of a couple of situations where, for lack of an air mover or for improper use of an air mover, it led to bad outcomes.

Joshua: Most definitely. We can sit back with maybe a glass of whiskey. We can talk about [laughs] the bad times, but I don’t think you want to do that today.

Russel: The purpose here is to educate and inform pipeliners and such. It’s not to call people out or point fingers, for sure. This is really about us as professionals and as people that care about what we do and the fact we do it in people’s neighborhoods, just helping people learn and understand and do a better job, all that stuff.

Joshua:

I guess, now that I’ve had a second to think about the previous question, I just want to add that, for both tools that we have here, that we manufacture, I’ll give a really good example of each, of how they’re used.

For the air mover, it’s a good idea to use an air mover for abandonment and specifically to get rid of residual gas. I’ve ran into gas companies, where I worked, in the area that I worked. We never measured to make sure that we had zero percent gas in an abandonment pipe, where you’re supposed to get rid of that residual gas.

A lot of times, they just stick a hose in the one end. They run it for a little bit. “OK. We’re good. Right?” We pack it up. We go home. I have seen some gas companies that I’ve worked with that are very specific. They take a measurement. They have to measure to zero percent gas. That’s in their standard.

If you can imagine if you were going to abandon 250 feet of eight-inch pipe, we developed a calculator that you can access on our website. You type those two figures in. It’ll tell you, to the second, how long it should take to fully abandon that.

When the air starts moving at the one end and by the time it clears all the way to that slug of clear air now — it’s taking all that residual gas up and out — it will tell you the time.

For example, if you typed in those numbers and you got three minutes and 23 seconds that it should take to fully abandon your pipe, you can have an inspector person or that type of figure can time it and just say, “Hey, we’re going to go four minutes. We’re going to run this thing for four minutes. Then we know it’s good.”

Or you can absolutely measure it. Working with a gas company in the Midwest, they actually used our purge stand in connection with an air mover.

Basically, where you were going to be using an air mover connect straight to a pipeline, they connected our purge stand to that purge point, up and out, and basically brought their purge point on top of the ditch. They connected the air mover to our purge stand.

They were basically operating that air mover from a safer location. It also gives them a test port right there. They can measure. They force their employees to measure in their standards that it’s zero percent. I have zero percent. Now I can officially abandon this pipe.

Russel:

My key takeaway is the best practice is, if you’re going to evacuate a pipe, you need to have a plan for getting it to zero. You need to measure to make sure you get there. Likewise…

[crosstalk]

Russel: …if you’re going to fill a pipe, you need to fill it to 100 percent gas. You need to have a plan for ensuring you get there. Fundamentally, that’s what I would say my takeaway from this is. If you need a way to do it, call Josh. That’s my third takeaway.

Joshua: [laughs]

Russel:

If I get to that point, call Josh because he’ll help me out.

[laughter]

Russel:

Hey, look, I appreciate you taking the time. One of things we’ll do, as we always do, is we’ll put all this on the website. We’ll link up the videos that Josh has. If anybody has questions about what this is and how it works, you can go and look at his videos. They’re very good. They’re simple. They’re quick. It makes it really clear what these things do and how they work.

Josh, hey, appreciate your time, man. Appreciate your creativity on creating your recording studio there.

Joshua: [laughs] Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Russel:

I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of the Pipeliners Podcast and our conversation with Joshua. 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. You can do that on Apple Podcast, Google Play, Spotify, wherever you happen to listen.

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Russel:

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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