The average person probably doesn’t think much about how the land around them can change. If they go for a walk or run on the same route every day, the odds are that it will all appear to be the same to them — unless something truly noticeable, like a major landslide, has happened.
If you work with pipelines, you know how frequently the conditions around an asset can change. Shifting factors like slope, seismic activity, fire, soil moisture, weather events, and methane levels can pose sudden and significant risks to pipeline integrity, even if nothing seems to have changed to the untrained eye.
With so many different geohazard-related variables, how can pipeline companies hope to manage those risks and avoid damage? De-siloed data is the key.
Not only are there several different geohazards at play for any given asset, but there’s also a wide variety of ways to collect data around those geohazards, from a field worker manually testing soil on the ground to drones and aircraft collecting weather information to satellites capturing geothermal images.
There are also many different platforms built to analyze those disparate types of data. And when a company employs several specialized solutions to cover its bases, the data those solutions collect tends to end up dispersed across repositories that don’t communicate with each other.
As a result, companies struggle to get a complete, unified report on the risks affecting a particular asset. Important information can easily slip through the cracks, leading to damage that should have been foreseeable. And with PHMSA focusing its regulatory eye on natural force damage, companies that struggle to access and unify their pipeline risk data can also find themselves out of compliance with reporting requirements.
By de-siloing geohazard data and collecting it into a single accessible repository, companies can understand and act on risks much more quickly and confidently. Unlike siloed data, centralized data can be used by sophisticated geospatial algorithms at scale. This allows for risk management solutions that offer single-source, near-real-time hazard alerts that are automatically geofenced to a given asset, as well as cross-variable risk scores that give you a better sense of how urgently action is needed.
In fact, de-siloed data opens the door for automatic work order creation. When a pipeline integrity platform pulls all of the variable data from a single reliable source, it can easily introduce process automation rules that create work orders as soon as total risk reaches a certain threshold. In other words, the data that once slipped through the cracks of a siloed risk management system can instead be used to ensure early action on an asset, even if a human being hasn’t noticed that it’s vulnerable yet.
Whether a vendor solution actually offers these things depends, of course, on the vendor’s technical know-how and investment in innovation. But none of this is possible when data is dispersed and difficult to correlate.
The benefits of a de-siloed approach to collecting, correlating, and acting upon risk data are manifold. When you can act more quickly to address threats to pipeline integrity, you’re more likely to prevent damage and decrease methane emissions, which is necessary to protect the environment and the health of surrounding communities. Your company will also find it easier to remain compliant with PHMSA and other pertinent regulations. The financial impact is significant, too, with improved uptime and reduced operating expenses combining to make your business operations more efficient overall. And when external stakeholders see that your company is using data technology to successfully prevent damage, your public reputation will be enhanced, too.
But it all starts with choosing the right risk management solution. For an in-depth look at how Irth’s pipeline integrity solution can help your organization collect and use risk data more effectively, check out our recent webinar, or reach out to our team today.