America has 2.6 million miles of natural gas and hazardous liquid transportation pipelines, the largest network of pipelines in the world.
Pipeline owners rely on a variety of systems to ensure pipeline integrity, including visual inspections by ground crews, drones, aircraft, pigging, remote sensors, cameras, and satellites. These pipeline inspections include looking for leaks, corrosion, and damage, pressure testing, assessing soil condition and erosion around the assets, and more.
These activities are in pursuit of pipeline integrity’s goal: to ensure safety and reliability.
Unfortunately, not every pipeline owner has the best mix of data, tools, and experience to accomplish that goal.
The first indispensable ingredient for pipeline integrity is data. From PHMSA-reported and publicly available data on pipeline incidents, accidents, and failures to the details collected from surveying pipeline assets through visual inspections to environmental conditions around pipeline assets, including weather and seismic activity, pipeline owners gather data to help them figure out pipeline maintenance needs and the best way to protect their pipelines and prevent failures.
When following PHSMA guidance for pipeline integrity, pipeline owners collect data from many different sources in many formats. In its raw form, data doesn’t reveal the nuggets of valuable insight required to safeguard pipelines.
The silver bullet isn’t the data. It’s having the right tool to make sense of it.
Asset owners won’t have streamlined and efficient pipeline integrity without the right tool to consolidate the data and supercharged machine learning to understand the threat level of activities to pipelines. To illustrate, consider the Three Little Pigs fairy tale.
When the big bad wolf’s coming, a house made of straw has different considerations than a house made of bricks. The same applies to pipelines.
If your pipeline assets are old, comparable to a straw house from our fairy tale, it’s more susceptible to damage. When the quality and condition of your assets are better, they are naturally more resilient.
The condition of your assets is an important data point that must be accounted for when considering the risk of activity over pipelines. For example, if a 4.5 earthquake hits a mile from your pipeline, but the data shows you have the equivalent of a brick house-condition pipe, the right tool using machine learning would consider that a lower risk for damage. Without incorporating the critical data point about pipeline quality into the equation when deciding the best action to protect it, other asset owners might send a technician out to inspect the pipeline. This is extra effort — and expense — that isn’t warranted when all the data is analyzed using the right tool.
Many asset owners put the responsibility of gathering data and analyzing it on their IT or GIS professionals. Despite their talents, they aren’t experts in satellite imagery. These teams do not understand which imagery sets are most beneficial for what purposes. As they juggle all their other tasks, they don’t have the time to monitor the latest innovations in the field.
They can’t sort through disparate data sources to discern whether the information they see matters to your pipelines as quickly as machine learning can. If we return to our earthquake example, everyone can access earthquake data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Getting data to inform decisions isn’t the issue. But filtering it is. When your pipeline covers half the country, it’s important to be able to filter out if and how your assets might be vulnerable to earthquake activity. Without that insight, there will be many alerts with no clear direction on how to act. Just like when you get a severe thunderstorm or tornado warning scrolling on your TV that’s five counties over. It’s a false alarm for you.
Irth has the most complete data set on the market. We also have satellite experts, an industry-leading platform powered by machine learning, and the pipeline integrity expertise and experience to train those models. There’s a lot of satellite technology going up in the sky, but if you can’t make sense of it, it won’t help your pipeline integrity initiatives.