In this week’s episode of the Pipeliners Podcast, Jim Schauer returns to discuss virtual pipelines and natural gas operations. 

The episode explores the applications of virtual pipelines during planned and unplanned outages, emphasizing their significance in winter-peaking projects.

Listen to the episode now for insights into the technological aspects of virtual pipelines, including challenges and benefits, as well as the industry’s evolving approach to capturing and reusing vented gas in compliance with environmental regulations.

Virtual Pipelines in Natural Gas Operations Show Notes, Links and Insider Terms:

• Jim “Jimmy” Schauer serves as the Vice President, at Energy Worldnet, Inc, and is also co-host of the award-winning energy focus podcast Coffee with Jim & James. Connect with Jim on LinkedIn.
  • Energy Worldnet (EWN) delivers real solutions for Operator Qualification, Workforce and Data Management, Safety and OSHA Training, Compliance Services, and PSMS for the Pipeline industry.
• Virtual pipeline means connecting consumers with multiple gas sources, exceeding the scope of conventional gas pipelines and providing energy in isolated regions.
• CNG (Compressed Natural Gas) is produced by compressing natural gas to support its use – dictated by local pipeline interconnects and compressed at the fueling station.
• Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) is natural gas that has been cooled to a liquid state (liquefied), at about -260° Fahrenheit, for shipping and storage. The volume of natural gas in its liquid state is about 600 times smaller than its volume in its gaseous state in a natural gas pipeline.
• Downstream is the process involved in converting oil and gas into the finished product, including refining crude oil into gasoline, natural gas liquids, diesel, and a variety of other energy sources. The closer an oil and gas company is to the process of providing consumers with petroleum products, the further downstream the company is said to be.
• 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.
• LDC is a Local Distribution Company, or a utility that owns/operates its own natural gas pipeline network for the purpose of delivering gas to customers behind its system.
• ​​Cryogenics is the production of and behavior of materials at very low temperatures. Ultra-cold temperatures change the chemical properties of materials.
• Common Ground Alliance (CGA) is a member-driven organization dedicated to preventing damage to underground utility infrastructure and protecting those who live and work near these important assets through the shared responsibility of its stakeholders.  
• Gas flaring is the intentional and controlled combustion of waste products, or emergency pressure relief gas.  Through controlled combustion, the environmental impact is less than the release of the unburned hydrocarbons and other gases into the atmosphere.

Virtual Pipelines in Natural Gas Operations Full Episode Transcript

Russel Treat: Welcome to the “Pipeliners Podcast,” “Episode 320,” sponsored by EnerSys Corporation, providers of POEMS, the Pipeline Operations Excellence Management System, compliance and operations software for the pipeline control center to address control room management, SCADA, and audit readiness. Find out more about POEMS at EnerSysCorp.com.

Announcer: The Pipeliners Podcast, where professionals, Bubba geeks, and industry insiders share their knowledge and experience about technology, projects, and pipeline operations. Now your host, Russel Treat.

Russel: Thanks for listening to the Pipeliners Podcast. I appreciate you taking the time. To show that appreciation, we give away a customized YETI tumbler to one listener every episode. This week, our winner is Angel. Congratulations, Angel. Your YETI is on its way. To learn how you can win the signature price back, stick around till the end of the episode.

This week, we spoke to Jim Schauer with Energy Worldnet to talk about virtual pipelines and natural gas operations. Hey Jim, welcome back to the Pipeliners Podcast.

Jim Schauer: It is great to be here. I think this is my third time, Russel, on the Pipeliner Podcast. I feel like a veteran.

Russel: You definitely are. You definitely are. I think you are also one of the very early guests because Energy Worldnet was a sponsor very early in the Pipeliner Podcast days. Then, you guys decided to do your podcast, your “Coffee with Jim & James,” and do your own thing, which is awesome. I support it. You all do great stuff.

Jim: Thank you.

Russel: Anyways, welcome back. Again, why don’t you just remind the listeners a little bit about who you are and what you do there in Energy Worldnet?

Jim: Absolutely. Jim Schauer. I’m Vice President at Energy Worldnet. I love the energy industry. I’ve been with it for just under 25 years right now. I would say I am an employee of Energy Worldnet, but I am also an employee of our industry, and I love our industry. Anything I can do to make it better, more productive, safer, I will

Russel: I am very much kind of the same way. I just find the whole energy business awesome. It took me a long time to get into the business. I got here a little later than a lot of people do in their journey, but I’ve been here a long time now. I’m not going anywhere.

Jim: There you go. There you go.

Russel: Look, I brought you on to talk about virtual pipelines. What the heck is a virtual pipeline? Let’s just start there.

Jim: That’s a great question. I love that question, because I do actually speak on this probably two to three times a year still. I got involved with virtual or mobile pipelines around 2008, 2009. They’ve had a definite “affection” for them ever since.

In short, what they are, that’s a process of that, there’s ever a disruption in the main pipeline supply for a town, municipality, business, plants, whatever the case may be, that should become disrupted. A virtual or mobile pipeline is the ability to bring in CNG compressed natural gas in large trucks, so to speak, or LNG, liquefied natural gas, in LNG tankers.

Again, via truck roll these are able to hook up into a connection point and feed downstream mobily temporarily. It can be for a couple hours. It could be for a couple of days. It can be for a few months.

A lot of times right now with winter peaking projects, I know across certain areas, the United States, people have LNG tankers sitting on hand ready to go in case it gets too cold and they cannot supply what they would want to keep all the homes and businesses up and running with safe, reliable natural gas. Does that make sense, Russel, because again, my folks don’t know about this, and I’ve been living it for a long time.

Russel: A couple things. This is a very natural gas specific kind of thing. Likewise, it’s a very kind of in-user specific thing. It’s very much a distribution getting gas to the end user.

I’m familiar with it. I’ve seen it in my career, particularly in older utilities that might have choke points in their systems when they’re expecting a cold front or a severe weather event with a lot of cold and they want to make sure they can keep the burner on and keep people’s homes heated. They’ll dispatch these trailers, so they can get more gas into the system and they would be able to just take it through the normal flow paths.

Jim: Nope, you’re absolutely right and that was a huge thing. Winter peaking, I would say, is a big emphasis. Again, when you think about it really makes sense because the amount of days that they are probably going to need that could literally be anywhere from 1 to 10 days a year. The other alternative would be to run another pipe, a midstream pipe into that system, which can be very costly, and such, for just 10 days. Winter peaking is a huge emphasis of it.

The other part, too, is planned and unplanned outages. Planned outages, too, we’re dealing with around 20 years of pipeline integrity projects, where midstream or certain pipes over 99 PSI or 125 PSI – depending on which one you look at – need to be integrity tested every five to seven years. Now, that sounds like a pretty big task.

It can get really big, especially, in certain parts of the country when you may have a midstream or transmission pipe that runs, let’s say, 20 miles, and feeds seven municipalities. When that has to go down for integrity testing, depending on what type of testing, it could be pigging, or it could be hydrostatic testing.

Hydrostatic testing, I’ll tell you, that’s where I’ve dealt with, over my career, a lot of opportunities where that pipe is down, and it is down for days and days. There is not a workaround with that unless you can run a bypass, or something. Virtual pipelines are a great opportunity for those planned outages to take care of folks when those integrity tests are going on.

Russel: I’m familiar with, I would say, three mechanisms for doing this sort of thing.

One mechanism would be the high pressure, basically, a tractor trailer that’s got a tube bundle on the back of it where they can compress natural gas up to several thousand PSI. They’ve got a lot of gas they can put on a truck. Then, that thing has a regulator set on the back of it that’ll get the gas down to pressure it can deliver into a system.

If you go to the AGA and go to the trade shows, somebody will bring one of those trucks. You’ll have a chance to go look at it and walk around it. Very impressive when they’re sitting in the back of the exhibit hall. That’s one mechanism.

The other mechanism I’ve seen is LNG facilities where a utility operator will have an LNG plant where, over the course of the year, during the lower volume months, they’re taking gas and liquefying it, so that they have available to put it back in the system.

That’s more about cost management than it is about capacity management, often. They can buy the gas when it’s cheap, and deliver it back to their customers. If they were buying that gas on the spot, it might be quite expensive.

Jim: I would say it’s both. Being an ex-operator, I know that in our system, we had a LNG plant. You’re absolutely right, spend the summer months filling that up when, typically, historically, natural gas prices are low. Then, you can use those in the winter months when it is, typically, some of the prices are a little bit higher.

I would say, at the core function of those plants, they are peaking plants. That’s what I always refer to them as . They’re ready to go when conditions, operating conditions, they need more volume, more natural gas into the system, and they would run those plants.

Russel: The big transmission pipes that are delivering the gas, they have pressure, they have delivery issues that the peak shaving plants can make up. Basically, you’re taking…Those LNG facilities, they’re not delivering to the choke points. They’re delivering to the entire system, typically.

Jim: Typically, again, downstream of the town border station or city gate, so to speak. They’re delivering into the downstream LDC grid, local distribution company grid. That’s what they’re designed for. That also has grown the virtual pipeline recently, because these plants have been around for decades.

Russel: Oh, yeah.

Jim: When you look at the amount of days that they run to help feed the system, it could be 20 days a year. What are they doing for the other 340 days out of the year?

Then, they got into the idea that with technology growing, with LNG tankers becoming more and more efficient, coming in and taking that off for other applications. They could actually be a little bit more diversified with not just feeding a grid for 20 days, but also selling LNG into tankers for other applications.

There’s so many applications for LNG. If people aren’t aware of LNG, you hit on it very well. You talked about compressed natural gas into tube trailers. The old school tube trailers would hold about 120 MCF. Maybe a little bit more, maybe a little bit less. Now, some of the new ones are holding up to three, four hundred MCF.

An LNG tanker that almost looks like a water truck with a semi in the front being hauled down the road, those can hold six, seven times what one tube truck can haul. It’s a volume game with that when you can get almost 800 MCF out of one of the LNG tankers.

To put that in perspective, a typical Minnesota home uses approximately, let’s say, 70, 80 MCF a year. One LNG tanker could feed a typical Minnesota home for 10 years. That’s what it’s like to be like, “Wow, that’s…”

Again, it’s cryogenics. What happens is you take 600 and some odd cubic feet of natural gas. You cool it to  265 degrees approximately. At that point, it turns into liquefied natural gas. That turns out into one cubic foot. It’s a 600 to 1 ratio. You take that one cubic foot of LNG, put it in one of those LNG tankers.

A lot of people are thinking, “Are those really huge walls and insulation?” Most of the very high tech ones run a vacuum. There’s an inner and an outer wall that may only be two to three inches apart, but it’s a vacuum in there. Vacuum is one of the best insulators known to mankind.

Russel: That’s why people love their YETIs.

Jim: Exactly, that’s what I tell people. It’s like a huge YETI.

Russel: It’s the same technology you’re using in a YETI. It’s exactly right.

Jim: It is.

Russel: A lot of people have heard about LNG. When they think about LNG, typically, what they think about is the big facilities that are sitting on the Gulf Coast, filling up the tankers, and shipping natural gas to Europe, or whatever.

Certainly, that is one use of LNG. What people don’t realize is that the peak shaving LNG and the truck level LNG has been around a lot longer than the big plants, but it’s the same technology scaled down.

Jim: Absolutely. Again, I’ve been to some LNG peaking plants that have been around for 30, 40 years. A lot of technology upgrades, material upgrades, and such like that, but it has been around for a long time. It’s a great, great solution.

When you think about the ability to have one cubic foot of LNG that, once it becomes vaporized in a controlled setting, expands to 600 to 1, that gives you an idea of how much energy is in one of those tankers. It is an efficient way to deliver a lot of natural gas to an endpoint.

Russel: A lot of people don’t understand, too, about LNG, it’s a cryogenic fluid. Basically, what that means is it’ll exist as a liquid at atmospheric pressure, but it’s a super cold liquid at atmospheric pressure. It’s basically sitting there as a liquid and boiling off, right?

Jim: Yeah, and low pressure. When I used to run a company that had LNG tankers, people that didn’t know, they would be like, “What’s the pressure at these? Five, seven, nine, a thousand PSI?” I’m like, “Right now, we’re at four.” They’re like, “Four hundred?” I’m like, “No, four PSI.”

Pressure was our nemesis in the LNG world. The more that it starts to boil off and heat up, the greater the pressure is in that. Low pressure was beautiful for us.

That’s when we took it, and then we controlled the expansion of it to build up the pressure. Then, we could deliver it through a vaporizer – whether that be an ambient or a gas fired, or whatever the case may be – and then into a flange point where we could deliver that.

Russel: Then, likewise, what a lot of people don’t realize is when that stuff boils off, that gas itself is at that temperature as well. You can’t take that super cold gas, and put it into a utility system. That causes you all kinds of difficulties.

Jim: It certainly does. It’s that controlled heating of it, too. There’s two aspects, too. On the LNG side, it’s absolutely right, bringing that temperature up. The other thing, too, on the CNG side, you had mentioned earlier, again, a lot of those CNG tube trucks run, let’s say, 1,800, 2,000, 2,200 PSI, but you’re going to deliver into something different.

Let’s say you’re in a municipality in the Southern United States, and they require 50 PSI. You just can’t open up the valve, and dump in 2,000 PSI into that system. You have to use regulators to rig them down. For every hundred PSI you reduce that, you’re losing 10 degrees.

When you think about that, going from, let’s keep it simple, 2,000 down to 100 PSI, you could be dropping the temperature of that to 190 degrees from where it is. You could have rigs and other things freezing up. Heaters, controlled heaters in both applications are absolutely needed.

Russel: Also, a little counterintuitive when you’re talking about liquefied natural gas or compressed natural gas that you have to heat it. How do you do that in a way that’s safe?

Jim: Exactly.

Russel: That’s some of the tricky bits of working with that kind of tech. To your point, I think that this kind of stuff, certainly, the big operators are familiar with this. The operators that have older systems where they’re growing, they’re adding houses, and they have choke points in their systems, they’re all familiar with this.

For the smaller operators where they have these projects coming to do pipe replacement, this is going to be really critical for continuing to provide service when they’re replacing old city mains, and such.

Jim: Absolutely. If there’s not a way to backfeed it – again, I used to say this, and I wasn’t being facetious – a lot of times, LNG and CNG are the last considered options. From what I’ve seen over the 15 some years, people would put in bypasses and hard bypasses, new pipes, and such like that. They wouldn’t understand the ease and the value of using LNG.

One thing I used to say to folks, too, that through…It’s being delivered in an LNG tank – again, we call it virtual or mobile pipeline – where you typically get it from that midstream that’s two miles down the road at the town border station or city gate that’s transferred in.

If an LNG tanker or tankers are brought in and fed into that, that’s a mobile pipeline, where before, they would be spending lots of money for bypasses, hardware, construction projects, so they could have a bypass to deliver it. Now, they could do with LNG and it’s a pipeline.

What do we know about gas delivery into utilities? Those are generally recouped through the rate base. Whether it’s through a pipeline that’s been there for 20 years or an LNG, you just recoup that through your rate base.

Customers, those that live in those areas, want safe, reliable natural gas. They don’t want outages. They rely on it. When all of a sudden somebody wakes up and they can’t cook their eggs and the water out of the shower is cold because there’s no natural gas, that’s an issue.

Russel: We don’t, any of us, like taking cold showers.

Jim: No.

Russel: It’s interesting to me. Why do you think that operators would choose to do bypasses when an LNG tanker or a CNG tanker might be a more cost effective solution?

Jim: Well, I hate to say it, but when you look back, we’ve always done it that way. If we can’t deliver a gas through that pipe, we put another pipe in the ground and that’s the way we’ve always done it.

I would say that the ability to use virtual on mobile pipelines has greatly increased over the last 15 years. I think the awareness has increased, I think the understanding, I think the accounting bit a bit, as I alluded to before, where it can be recouped through the PGA or the CGA.

That awareness and that understanding is starting to take hold. That’s probably why I still give two to three presentations a year at gas associations as to some of the benefits about virtual pipelines. It’s absolutely a great surgical tool to use during certain needs.

It performs beautifully and it does the job that needs to be done and then it disconnects and it goes off to the next project. You don’t have another extra pipe in the ground…Since we had to put that pipe in the ground now at a cost of X amount or hundreds of thousands dollars, there’s a good chance we might need that in the next 20 years, maybe.

Russel: Yes, all of a sudden, you’re going to continue to operate and maintain that pipe.

Jim: Oh, yes, you are.

Russel: It’s not just the cost putting it in. It’s the cost of operating and maintaining it. If you’re not going to operate it or maintain it, then you have to decommission it so you have that cost as well. It’s a very attractive alternative.

The other thing I would say about this topic in general, and I’ve done a couple of podcasts on this, but with the new methane rules that are coming through the regulators and heading towards our industry, there’s a lot of pressure to stop venting of gas on blowing down a meter tube.

I’ve got to do work on line segments. I got to blow that line segment down. Particularly with the compressed natural gas, that’s the same kind of trailer that you would put gas into rather than venting it.

All you have to do is add one more piece of equipment that captures that gas and compresses it and pushes it into that tube bundle. Now all of a sudden, I’m not venting that methane.

Jim: I can tell you back in the 2014, ’15s, and ’16s, people were looking at it. There’s a place up north called the Bakken that many of us have heard about.

Bakken, those days, there was a huge uproar because the Bakken was going off. It was gang bus rides. The people that live there had concerns because at night, depending on where you were, you could see 10, 30, 100 flares going off. Up in that area, some of the regulators or some of the state entities said, “Hey, no more flaring.”

For people like that are at the [inaudible 21:45] and on in the patch, so to speak, what are you supposed to do if you don’t flare? One of the things was maybe to capture the flare, compress it, put it into tube trucks, take it down the road and actually reinsert it somewhere as a way, so it just isn’t flared. They’re definitely looking for ways to absolutely capture that.

There’s a lot of organizations right now, if you just flow through the LinkedIn, there’s a lot of people that are doing that recapture where instead of it’s been vented out of a pipeline, Main Street USA, instead of venting that 200 yards of pipe, they’re actually capturing it, compressing it, and/or putting it back into another part of the system, so no venting, no methane escape. That’s a big topic right now. You’re absolutely right.

Russel: The reason I bring it up is when you start talking about LNG tankers, you start talking about CNG tankers and such, that same kind of equipment is used when I’m doing these other kinds of operations. It’s just a matter of how much gas am I going to vent and then what size of equipment do I need to capture that vented gas.

Jim: It’s more so, and I would say on the CNG side now. It’s a lot more mechanically easier to bring in compressors onto a site and compress them. Some of the micro-LNG units are a little bit still…

Russel: They’re not that micro.

Jim: No, they’re not, and they’re not that temporary. No, no, no.

Russel: I know that…

Jim: The technology is there, though. It’s an example for…

Russel: It’s coming, too, right?

Jim: Yeah. I’m excited to see in 2033, in 10 years from now, where we are in those arenas and how far we’ve come, because we’ve come a long way.

Russel: I got a feeling, in another 10 years, there will be virtually zero vented gas. Either from flares in production, or from flares at processing facilities, or from normal maintenance, O&M operations of pipe. I don’t think people are going to be venting gas. Fundamentally, I think that’s a good thing.

If we start building this equipment and we build it at scale, and people start building the practices to use it, then they’re going to have ways to capture gas off their system. The minute that there’s more ways to capture and reinsert gas, there’s all kinds of other opportunities that we probably aren’t even contemplating that are going to come up.

Jim: At least we’re at that point that we might be consciously incompetent. We know that we don’t know all of the opportunities or answers. At least we’re in the mindset of we want to explore those, and we want to keep learning about those. One project will lead us more steps closer in that journey.

Russel: All the technology exists. It may not exist at the right scale, it may not exist for all the operating variables, but all that technology exists and has done for a long time. This is an optimization effort. It is not a development effort.

Jim: I would wholeheartedly agree with you, absolutely.

Russel: I could even see somebody figuring out, “You know, if I capture all the flare gas in the Eagle Ford, and I figure out a way to put that into LNG tankers on a train rail, and I can move that to where the power plants are in Houston, then maybe I don’t need to get permitted for 400 miles pipeline. I can just put it on a train, and I don’t need permits.” I could see all that happening.

Jim: There’s so many pieces. I don’t want to call it a puzzle in a negative way, but there’s so many facets to our whole industry.

Russel: There’s opportunities. As this technology evolves and gets better understood and more cost effective, there’s plenty of opportunities to do other interesting things with it.

Jim: Absolutely. No, absolutely.

Russel: Somebody probably just listened to this podcast and went, “Huh, that’s a great idea. I’m going to figure out how to do that.”

Jim: I hope so. See, that’s the point why we do podcasts, Russel.

It’s because we may not have the correct answer, but if we prompted somebody to have one idea that makes them more productive, safer, whatever the case may be, then I feel that you or I, that’s why we do our podcast. If we could affect one person positively to do something better or safer, then we’ve done our job.

Russel: I say all the time, too, that anytime you’re doing work in our industry, it’s never about the answers. It’s always about the questions. It’s never the question that you didn’t answer exactly right that gets you in trouble. It’s always the question you failed to ask. That’s the one that gets you in trouble.

Jim: Well, it is. We need to not suffer in silence, so to speak, and think that sometimes, our question might be a problem, or whatever. If you have a question or a thought – whether it’s in a committee meeting, or in a boardroom meeting, or whatever the case may be – ask that question.

I would guarantee, especially, I’ve seen it so many times in gas associations’ big meetings, somebody asked a question, you could see the light bulb go on. At least 20 percent of the other people saying, “I was just thinking that. I wanted to ask that.”

Russel: “I’m so glad you asked that question, but I didn’t want to ask it.”

Jim: “No, I didn’t want to ask it.”

Russel: “I didn’t want to ask it, but I’m so glad that you asked it. That’s OK, I don’t mind looking stupid.”

Jim: Well…

Russel: Actually, ignorant is the better word. Stupid is I don’t have the ability to learn. Ignorant is I don’t know. There’s lots and lots of things I’m ignorant about.

Jim: I like to say my goal for myself is to go from unconsciously incompetent – that’s where I don’t know what I don’t know – to being consciously incompetent. At least, then, I know that I don’t know something about a subject, and I need to learn it so I become consciously competent.

People make fun of me. My team makes fun of me all the time, because I always bring this up. I’m like, “This is serious.”

Russel: I have a little different model on that. This has nothing to do with virtual pipelines, but I have a little different model on that. I think there’s three domains of knowledge. There’s what I know, there’s what I know that I don’t know, and I’m comfortable with it and I don’t want to know it. Income tax would be a good example of that.

Jim: Agreed.

Russel: There’s another domain is t that I don’t know that I don’t know. Where do you think the biggest opportunity lies?

Jim: For me, it’s that middle ground where I know that I don’t know something. That’s where I can lead into it. That area where you don’t know what you don’t know…

Russel: That’s where all the opportunity is.

How do you discover what you don’t know?

Jim: Tell me.

Russel: Pain, generally.

Jim: Generally, agreed.

Russel: No, I’m being a little flipping, but you have to do things you’ve not done before. You have to think about things, read things, get exposed to things you’ve not contemplated or been engaged with. Then, you start finding out about all these things you don’t know.

As I’m counseling and mentoring the younger people in our company, I tell them a lot that, “Look, a big part of this…” This goes to why I do the Pipeliners Podcast is a big part of being a good pipeliner and advancing in your career is to get clear about what are all the things that you know that you don’t know.

You can only expand what you know to a certain degree, because everything that I know has a shelf life. Things I did five years ago that I was highly competent in, if I went back to them, I could learn them again, but I wouldn’t be highly competent in them.

I can only be highly competent in so much, because there’s so much you have to learn to be highly competent in a vertical domain. What I can know is there’s 100 domains out there, and I don’t know those domains.

Jim: What you and I absolutely…We thrive on the idea of knowing people, you and I do, because we’re not going to have all that. When somebody asks me, “Jimmy, do you know somebody, or do you know anything about this subject?” I’m like, “No, I don’t, but I know somebody that does. Let me connect you up.” I do that all the time.

That’s a quest of mine in the industry is to make sure that I know the right people and I know what those people do in the industry. I know what entities do. I know what companies do, what their strengths are. That is another thing that I’m passionate about.

If I could help somebody get down that path quicker, because I can help them talk to somebody that may have a solution…I’m not going to know everything, but, again, I keep my ears open all the time for those opportunities.

Russel: Knowing who the top two or three guys are in a particular domain is important. Actually, one of the reasons when I started the Pipeliners Podcast – I built a website, and I made sure that we captured information about all the guests – is for that very reason.

I know that people go to the website, and they’re like, “I got to find somebody that knows something about – I don’t know, pick a topic – geotechnical issues in integrity management. Who’s the guy I can go talk to about that?”

Jim: You just go down the list, and you see that. I dare say, I’ll throw it out there, if ever anybody wants me to bend their ear or wants to bend my ear about virtual pipelines, CNG, LNG, anything like that, I welcome the opportunity.

I’ve been out of it directly for a couple of years now. Now, I’m more in the regulatory compliance, OQ world, but I still have a passion and purpose for those virtual pipelines and use applications, LNG and CNG. I know people in the industry that can help.

Russel: I’ll bet, you still look for opportunities, get your FRCs and work boots on, and go out and hook one up.

Jim: You better believe it. Put those steel toes on. I love being on the site. I love it.

Russel: Exactly. You and me, too. If I go too long without doing that, I feel like my skills are atrophying.

Jim: Absolutely. Oh, no, I love being on a right way, or a drill like that, or whatever.

Russel: Put me on a measurement skid, and let me figure out what’s going wrong. That would be my happy place.

Jim: We need it.

Russel: Look, Jim, as always, thank you so much. I appreciate your time. You’re a great guest. You’re welcome back anytime you’ve got something you think would be of value to the listeners.

Jim: I appreciate it, brother. I appreciate it so much. It’s always a pleasure to be on your great podcast. You have a great form. Again, all my best, and kudos to you. I look forward to the next time when I have another interesting subject to talk about.

Russel: Great.

Jim: All right.

Russel: I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of the Pipeliners Podcast and our conversation with Jim. 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.

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Transcription by CastingWords