When it comes to pipeline safety, understanding threats and taking appropriate action when danger hits from various angles requires the right data and tools. Without them, it’s impossible to process what it means to inform the best action and prevent incidents.
Severe weather events and geohazards add a layer of complexity to pipeline safety. Weather patterns are changing across geographical areas and weather events are more extreme.
Despite the dangers threatening pipelines, there is a lot of predictive potential in all the data available about the environment surrounding a facility line, such as soil, slope, weather, and more.
When changing weather patterns are combined with high demand for services, how can pipeline owners leverage all this new information to make better decisions for our safety?
That was the question Irth Executive Vice President and Irth podcast host Jason Adams; Justin Oliveira, CEO, Boston Geospatial; and Matthew Abbitt, Irth’s Chief Product Officer, explored in the “Navigating the Terrain: Geospatial Intelligence and Pipeline Safety” podcast episode.
Natural threats, including geotechnical or geohazards, pose a significant risk to pipeline integrity. Natural threats include floods, hurricanes, freeze/thaw cycles, river erosion, sinkholes, and geological events like landslides and earthquakes. Whether they are geohazards or other outside forces, these threats can lead to pipe degradation and impart stresses and strains on the pipes that can cause failures to the welds and equipment. Additionally, extreme weather events like flooding and hurricanes can exacerbate or accelerate geohazards.
“A single threat is significant by itself. But when you pair multiple threats on top of each other, you can see a different threat profile across the board,” said Matthew Abbitt, Irth’s Chief Product Officer on the Irth podcast.
Let’s say you have a really steep slope with a lot of soil moisture. Using satellite imagery, you see there’s a methane plume. That could signal an issue. Perhaps there was a slide that caused a pipe to break. This is happening all the time and more frequently, especially with weather events.
From PHMSA data, the average cost of an incident caused by an Earth movement, including things like landslides, sinkholes, settlement of the land, etc., is around $4 to $5 million. This is only direct damage to the pipeline. When you add lost revenue, indirect damages to the impacted area, and legal and regulatory fines, the cost can expand to $10 to $15 million on average for an incident.
Once an incident occurs, there are additional costs related to enhanced monitoring of pipelines to be compliant after regulators impose more oversight above and beyond what may have been done in the past.
PHMSA included several case studies about pipeline safety when they issued notices in mid-2019 and mid-2022 around geohazards.
“One of the cases I like to highlight, because in hindsight it was easy to see coming, was the 2020 failure of Denbury CO2 pipeline in Yazoo County, Mississippi due to a landslide,” said Justin Oliveira, CEO, Boston Geospatial on the podcast episode.
Denbury’s CO2 liquid carbon dioxide pipeline ran underneath a state highway. After a landslide hit the area, about 30,000 barrels of liquid carbon dioxide were immediately released and then vaporized into the atmosphere.
When you review the weather in the months leading up to the incident, the soil moisture was much higher than average. This fact, along with the slope and soil type, created a higher risk for this pipeline.
Using the right tools to do assessments, such as the slope risk application in Irth, higher moisture, slope, and soil type, would have escalated the risk profile on this pipeline. With the right data and tools, Denbury could have seen the potential for an incident and acted to prevent it before it occurred.
In recent years, companies have used remote-sensing platforms to gather data about their pipelines. A lot of this was manual such as LiDAR on cars and then planes.
Today, there is a shift to using satellites to scope an entire pipeline.
“Satellite radar data has a great advantage over electro-optical and, in many cases, LiDAR. One of the main advantages is the fact that it can operate at night and through clouds and poor weather conditions,” said Oliveira.
Through technologies like synthetic aperture radar and a process called interferometry, we can look at really small changes to the terrain over time and understand how those might relate to geohazards around and along infrastructure, whether that’s a pipeline, a road, a facility. Then we can relate that to risk.
Digital twinning is another way the technological landscape has shifted. This is the idea of combining multiple data sets to create a synthetic, semi-augmented perspective of what’s happening around your critical network infrastructure. For example, combining LiDAR data and other terrain models from satellites with soil and meteorological data to develop models for the susceptibility of failure. Then, using that to score total risk for an asset, asset owners can use that risk profile to inform decisions.
The third area is a combination of all those and fusing these geospatial technologies with engineering and design analysis. For example, using the measurement data about the ground’s movement around a pipeline, relating it to and estimating things like strain and stress, and comparing it to the allowable stress the pipeline was designed for.
When you have a common platform where you’re managing multiple facets of your risk management initiatives, such as dig tickets, work items, etc., rather than just one, it allows the potential for feedback loops.
For example, if you knew a particular slope or several slopes along a right-of-way with potential for failure, you could annotate that in your risk management platform. When patrollers schedule their patrol flights, knowing this information, you could request that they take an extra low pass over it to discern if there are any signs of potential failure.
Currently, if these feedback loops are happening, they are not automatic and are narrow in scope. Technology will allow these feedback loops to happen at scale. This would support PHSMA’s expectation that patrol programs have the responsibility to look for geohazards, which is currently hard to do.
Additional innovations are on the horizon that could be beneficial in the next five to 10 years. Of course, there’s a lot of buzz and excitement about generative AI. Recommendation engines are also expected to be a huge area in geospatial.
Recommendations engines for pipeline integrity management could take the data, identify risky areas by assessing the many facets at play, and then suggest the best actions across the organization. Recommendation engines could suggest technical actions, prompt business and public relations decisions, compliance actions, and more by balancing out these priorities and mandates.
In the short-term we must take a very complex set of data to make it very easy for the end-user to understand a risk profile.
The data to enhance the safety of your pipeline is out there, but it’s most likely in many different spots or siloed into several systems, making insights difficult to extract.
The industry is at a point where it needs to use technology to operationalize data, condensing it down to make it useful and actionable.
Irth and our partners, such as Boston Geospatial, have developed and will continue to enhance solutions that help operators move the needle in pipeline safety and integrity.