New Technology Could End The Debate Over Pipeline Safety

Who could have ever imagined that North America would surpass Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas liquids? A decade ago, that would have seemed laughable.

Yet that’s exactly what has happened; and it’s not just Saudi Arabia that has been left in North America’s dust -- Russia has, too.

The surge in North American oil and gas production is arguably the most important development in energy over the last decade. That’s the good news. The not so good news is that North America doesn’t have nearly enough oil and gas pipelines to accommodate its 11-million-barrel-a-day output level.

The famously unresolved proposed Keystone XL pipeline would carry oil from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast, but its future is in legal and political limbo. The controversial Northern Gateway pipeline, proposed as an alternative to Keystone XL, would connect Canada’s oil sands to the Pacific Coast, allowing greater volumes of oil to be shipped to Asia, but it, too, is still on the drawing board.

Both are good examples of how pipelines – considered the safest way to move oil and gas – have become politicized and scrutinized, and not without reason. Despite their reliability, pipelines still lead to an unacceptable rate of safety mishaps. They corrode and rupture, which threatens workers and nearby communities. In 2013 alone, over 119,000 barrels of oil were spilled in 623 incidents.

America’s existing pipelines are getting older and more prone to corrosion, and over the next five to 10 years, there will be a significant increase in the number of new pipelines.

SUMMARY OF THE TECHNOLOGY:

It’s called a “pig” ( Sorry to Muslims out there ).

One of the major ways pipeline operators detect corrosion is with a “pig,” a machine that travels down the inside of a pipeline looking for problems.

Pigs are not new — the industry has long relied heavily on them—and the newest generation of pigs, known as “smart pigs,” is considered an improvement over the pigs of yesterday. Smart pigs give a read on the state of the pipeline, such as cracks, corrosion, and metal loss. Operators receive this information in a control room and can then dispatch crews to fix the problem. As of 2012, 93 percent of pipeline inspections were conducted using smart pigs.

The real innovation comes from the Pipeline safety company Fox-Tek, a subsidiary of Augusta Industries (CVE: AAO), which uses such a system to detect corrosion, as well as a fiber optic system to detect bends, strains and stress in pipelines.

Theirs is its data analytics package. Companies that use smart pigs usually need to spend months doing post-inspection analysis, but Fox-Tek has developed proprietary software that does continuous and automatic analysis.

Fox-Tek’s sensors gather information and automatically send back confidential reports on everything the company needs to know – temperature, pressure, strain, rates of corrosion, etc. in the form of handy graphs, charts and diagrams. It eliminates the need for an army of people to go out and inspect pipelines and then come back to do the analysis.

The pipeline safety market is massive and growing, but one of the major hurdles for new technologies like advanced sensors and software will be reluctance by pipeline companies to proactively invest in corrosion management and maintenance. In the past, they have largely focused on the bare minimum and viewed safety as a regulatory requirement.

The "safest way" of moving these products has " an unacceptable rate of safety mishaps." The solution obviously being to use methods that are much less safe.

Do these people even read what they produce?

. . . but Fox-Tek has developed proprietary software that does continuous and automatic analysis.

Back in the '80s I was a programmer for a rent-a-rig oil company. One of my projects was to write an engine oil analysis program. The deal was to check for unusual amounts of contaminants. (Metals off the top of my head). If there was an increase in barium, it meant the main bearings in a diesel engine were going, silica meant sand getting past the filters, etc.

I marveled that it was no wonder we were world leaders, doing stuff like that and mentioned the neatness of it to my boss, who was a retired Navy commander. He said the Navy had been doing that for a long time and gave me a truism that has stuck with me ever since: "You can't prevent breakdowns but you can control them".

That came to mind when I had to write a preventive maintenance program - inspect this every week, that every month, etc. That was incorporated into a mechanics work order list, so that when he went in to repair an engine, for instance, all the other repairs due were also shown so that if he had to take apart some module, he could fix any other parts associated with it.

Those people really had their act together.

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