Welcome to the Pipe Liners podcast, Episode 124, sponsored by Satellitix, a cloud-based geospatial analytics solution, processing multi and hyper spectral imagery from satellites, aircraft drones and fixed cameras to lower the cost and improve the timeliness of identifying leaks, encroachment, ground movement and other pipeline concerns. To learn more about Satellitix, visit Satellitix.com. The Pipe Liners podcast where professionals, public eks and industry insiders share their knowledge and experience about technology, projects and pipeline operations. And now your host, Russell Treet.
Thanks for listening to the Pipe Liners podcast. I appreciate you taking the time and to show that appreciation, we give away a customized Yeti Tumblr to one listener each episode. This week, our winner is Jody Lambrite with Valero. Congratulations, Jody.
Your Yeti is on its way. To learn how you can win this prize pack, stick around to the end of the episode. This week, we're very fortunate to have Michael Stackhouse join us. Michael's been involved in integrity management for many years, and he's coming to the Pipe Liners podcast to help me get educated about crack management as a part of an integrity management program.
Michael, welcome to the Pipe Liners podcast. Thank you very much. So if you would, as we're getting kicked off here, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background, how you got into pipeline integrity management, who you work for, all that kind of good stuff. Yes, sir.
Thank you. So I've been in the asset integrity world since 1985. It's been 35 years. I started out as a on the I-Live vendor side.
So I worked for Veko and Pytronics. And then shortly after Pytronics, I had an operator contact me and asked me to join their integrity engineering field and that was Koch Industries. After working on the I-Live vendor side, I helped help Koch Industries develop their digging and assessment criteria, their digging assessment procedures. And then I joined them in 1998.
And ever since I've been on the operator side, I currently worked for Phillips 66 as an asset integrity manager. And I've been there for about four years now back home here in Houston. Awesome. Awesome.
Well, if you're in Houston, we were talking about this before we got on the mic. We were all working from home these days. So I'm sure that's quite the adventure trying to do integrity management from the house. Yeah, it definitely is.
I think we're all trying to live through this new norm. But I'll tell you what, the remote working has been pretty easy. In fact, I think we're all getting a little more out of each other with the remote working. And I think we're all also selecting our meetings a little bit smarter, maybe a bit more efficiently.
We're getting all those meetings and getting all those meetings a little quicker. And I think we're all doing a little bit more work than what I thought we would. Yeah. I think that's probably true.
I think I'm certainly seeing that in my work. Although it is becoming a little bit like Groundhog Day because every day is kind of the same. It's a little strange. And the other thing is a little strange.
I can't remember how long it's been since I went an entire first quarter of the year and didn't make a single business trip. Yeah, you're so right. The other thing that's interesting is, you know, where socks very little now. Well, I have.
Yes. Somebody asked me earlier today on a recent on a call who's keeping their COVID-19 beard after the crisis. My comment to that was the juries out so far, my wife is not a fan. So anyway, well, look, I asked you to come on to talk about cracks and crack management because there's a lot of stuff going on around cracks.
So maybe you've been at this a long time. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the history of crack assessment and how that has evolved since you first started in the business. Yeah. So, you know, first of all, the knowledge of cracks has evolved.
And I think that's the most critical piece of this and the sharing of the information as an industry is another huge big evolution. Let me start with the knowledge piece. You know, as we were having failures as an industry and as we start sharing those failures, the industry gets a little smarter. And over the past, I'd say 10 years, the operators are sharing that information so much more readily and available to the rest of us.
And I think that's hugely helped the industry. When I first started, I don't think operators talked that much at all. But now we're all on these industry calls together. We're on API, AOPO, PRCI, and we talk almost on a monthly basis now as an industry through these different committees and committee meetings and other sharing events.
And I think that's been huge because we're talking a lot more. And through the talking, we're getting to know how we manage cracks internally and how we should be managing them as an industry, how we should be getting together as an industry and tackling the crack management together instead of siloed through an individual operator. Yeah. And this, you know, this is so core to pipeline safety.
I mean, it's so just direct line of sight between safe operations and incidents, right? When you start talking about integrity management. One of the things I think, I kind of asked this question in my experience, when I meet with somebody who's another expert in the field that I'm an expert in, and we start having a conversation. Oftentimes there's 80 or 90% or even more agreement about issues and responses and you know, all that sort of thing.
But in that other five or 10%, there's almost always one or two things that to the uneducated ear might be insignificant, but to the educated ear, make all the difference in the world. So that collaboration that information sharing is extremely critical. It's the way we move, you know, from 99.997 to 99.49s in terms of safety effectiveness. Yeah, you're exactly right.
And, you know, pipeline safety is not a competitive advantage amongst our industry. So we should be sharing that information. And I think that was a key turnaround for our industry was to work together. I give another example.
The ILI industry has always pushed their specifications on the operators. Well, currently the operators are getting together and saying, well, you know, we're the customer, we're the end user. What do we need? What do we want?
And we're actually having a different dialogue with the ILI vendors today on, you know, where the crack management and the crack ILI tools ought to go. Instead of them telling us what their specifications are, we're telling them what our specifications should be. And we're waiting for them to meet those specifications now. Yeah.
So now instead of the vendors driving industry, industry is driving the vendors. Right. But it's more of a partnership now. It's not really us driving them.
It's us working with them to get them where we all know we ought to be. So you started out talking about knowledge. And then I think the other thing you talked about was collaboration. So what's evolved historically around, we've talked about this a little bit, but what's evolved historically around that?
Well, the first thing we did is API put together a survey on cracks. We did this early on in 2015, I think. And what we learned was we were managing cracks differently. So that quickly got us all to, to, to an understanding that we, we probably ought to put together some specifications or some standards around crack management.
So we were doing it the same. So in 2016, all of our sponsors at API pushed us to come up with a recommended practice and we did develop and publish a recommended practice on crack management and it's API 1176 and we got that published in 2016. So that's one area where we pushed as an industry. And then the other thing is through PRCI, we've put together strategic initiatives around crack management through PRCI.
So we've had Cliff Johnson with the RCI own. It's been quite some time. So maybe you could just tell everybody a little bit about what is PRCI. Yeah.
So PRCI is a, is a group where it's an international committee where we all put our funding in order to drive research as an industry. So all of us put a little bit of funding into a big pool and then through our governance of PRCI and its pipeline research, Council International and through the governance of PRCI, we fund different research. And currently what we have going on is we're all funding a crack management strategic initiative for PRCI to better the industry around crack management and ILI capabilities. So I want to, I want to ask a question about crack management and why the focus on crack management.
So, you know, 2015 in the context of the evolution of pipeline safety is pretty current, right? Definitely. So what is it about crack and crack management that requires some special focus, if you will? Well, it's a, it's a unique defect in our pipe that is challenging to manage.
And what we learned was you need other people's thoughts and knowledge around it and through their experiences and their failures. And if you combine all the failures and failure reports, you can learn a ton together. So each one of us may have had our own issues, but when you can put all the issues together, you actually learn a lot more and you can share a lot more. And that's how the 1176 was put together.
It was put together through the thoughts and ideas and issues that we've all had individually compiled together for us to put together the standard. So is crack as composed to the, you know, so the other things you look at in ILI and I'm very, very far from an expert in ILI. I know enough about it to talk about it and be a little dangerous, but I would say that crack or that ILI has kind of come along from a geometry and corrosion inspection place and has evolved into more advanced things like cracks. Would that be true?
Yes, sir. It is. I think the ILI technologies themselves have come a long ways and they continue to get better as a technology on a daily basis. And ILI is only a piece of the crack management.
The other things that we've learned through put together everybody's thoughts and everybody's learnings around the failures was you have to know a lot about the material properties of the pipe. Oh, you have to know a lot about the toughness of the pipe and the pipe body and the bond line of the seams. You have to know a lot about how you're operating the light pipe. A huge piece of crack management, truthfully, is how you operate the pipe, especially for liquid operators.
One of the key preventative mitigated measures for crack management is limit your pressure cycles, limit the intensity and the frequency of your pressure cycles. Yeah, so that makes so much sense to me. And I think most people in the pipeline world would explain this, but I have at least one listener that knows nothing about pipelining. Again, I'm going to call out my wife.
So the way to think about this is if you're familiar with the coat hanger and you grab it and you start bending it, you know, eventually if you've been enough, it'll break apart. So it's the same kind of thing with a pressure cycle and put pressure on it. I expand the pipe. I take the pressure off it and contracts.
And as I do that over time, I'm going to eventually it becomes too much at some point. I guess it's what we're getting at. Right. And what we're dealing with is we're dealing with them for the seam defects, a manufacturing flaw that by itself is is benign.
But through the way you operate the asset, it cycles to a defect, to a crack. And then that crack grows over time. So you're right. It is like a coat hanger or even a paperclip.
You've been a paperclip once. Nothing happens. Right. And at a certain point, the frequency will get to you and it will break at a certain point.
So that's what we're learning is how do you manage the asset differently so that you aren't taking these benign hook crack defects or hook crack mill defects and growing them out or cracking them out. So unpack for me a little bit. What is a manufactured hook crack defect? So basically it was a defect that was developed through the manufacturing process of a certain type of ERW scene.
And there's quite a few different types. You have the AOSmith flash welding, but you have some other ERW manufacturers that you're going to have to give me the acronym, please ERW. Oh, sorry. Electrical resistant welding.
OK. And then you have some flash welding and some of those through the process of how they manufacture introduced little mill defects inherently in them that over time, we'll crack out based on how you're operating them. So you have pipe body cracks, which are generally stress corrosion cracking. And then you have others like in the seams that are developed from manufacturing defects that hook and crack out based on how you're operating them or based on your cycling.
Yeah. And that goes to how the pipes actually originally manufactured, right? Yes, sir. Yes, sir.
Yeah. So again, it's something I know very little about, but I'm, you know, I would assume that the way you make pipeline is you start out with, you know, obviously, you're going to start out with raw metal. You're going to work that into sheets and then you're going to roll it and get it to come together. That's exactly right.
And the seams are when you roll that together and then bond the seams together. And in the early manufacturing, sometimes those bonds weren't as strong as we would like them to be today. So through the years, you know, basically 1980 and beyond, they were a lot stronger bonds in those seams. Right.
So the pipes are good. It's just through through the way we're operating them. We were making them a little weaker. It's like anything that's mechanical, right?
If I run it long enough, it's eventually going to wear out. That's exactly right. Right. So it's just, that's just so the flip side of that is the better I take care of it, the longer I'm going to be able to run it and run it reliably.
Right. And you can change the way you operate it to extend the life of them. Yeah. If I use it, if I use an automobile analogy, if I change the oil frequently, if I don't break real hard all the time, I don't accelerate real hard all the time.
I'm going to get more mileage out of my car. That's why everybody wants to buy a car from the grandma, not from the 16 year old. That's a good way to put it. Well, you know, this is like what I what I try to do to integrate this stuff into my thinking is I try to come up with these analogies and it helps.
I realize that analogies are often flawed or limited, but it helps me understand and kind of incorporate it into my understanding about how this stuff works. Right. So we talked about in line inspection tools. We talked about pressure cycle management.
We've also gotten a lot better with data integration. So combining all the data that you have to fingerprint scenarios that may be indicative of of cracks or where to or to predict where you might have issues. So targeting data integration, combining all of your in line inspections with your protection, with your coatings, with your wet dry cycling. You can do a lot of data integration to help out as well.
So we've learned a ton there. Well, and that that actually that actually is probably a whole conversation just on its own as this idea of data integration, the amount of data that you deal with to do analysis for integrity management, it's really mind-boggling. Well, it really is. And even if we just talk about pressure cycle management, you know, we the amount of data you have on all your pressure sensors and your pressure data from the control center is massive.
And then distilling that down to what is a cycle, how much is it cycling? What's the frequency cycling is pretty mind-boggling too. But we've gotten a lot better to where you can monitor that a lot more often. Well, it's one thing just to think about it at the pressure instruments.
But the other part of this is that, you know, the pressure instruments are often separated by miles, if not tens of miles. And I really want to know pressure that happened on each string of pipe, which is a, you know, now I got to take those pressure transmitter numbers and combine that with what was the density of the fluid that's in the pipe and, you know, do some hydraulic calculations and figure out what was the pressure cycle on that piece of pipe. So that, that, that kind of additional data creation is, you know, it's many fold in order of magnitude, even more data than what you just got in the control room. That's exactly right.
And then the learnings and the collaboration as an industry, we've all gotten a lot better with that. Um, the other thing we've gotten better at is validating our tools, our in line inspection tools. So if we go back to that a little bit, we've learned that you have to take ownership in that information and you have to validate each bucket of defects within those tools to understand the overall accuracy of the in line inspection tools. So we've gotten a lot better at that.
We've all as an industry done a ton more digs. And then with that information, we can learn and share as an industry how good the tools are and how do you, how do you build response protocols off of the in line inspection data in order to help manage cracks as well? Yeah. I mean, it's, it's again, it's kind of, it's kind of mind boggling, but so if I might shift this a little bit, I want to talk a little bit more about the industry collaboration, um, because I think, you know, certainly collaborating between, you know, the operators and the vendors, you know, most people probably have some familiarity with how that works, even if they're not in integrity management, you know, how that works and other disciplines around by planning, um, could same kind of comment in terms of collaborating within the, you know, various operators, same kind of comment there.
I think one of the things I want to ask you about is what about collaborating within the various departments inside the operator itself, like between the control room and the hydraulic engineering and the integrity management? What, what did you see and evolve there? And where is that headed? Yeah, that's a good comment.
Um, you know, through through this cycle management alone, uh, from a liquid operator side, uh, you know, we've had to collaborate integrity, um, operations, control center and scheduling. Yeah, I even think about scheduling, right? That's, that's, but it makes perfect sense. Right.
So in order to bring your cycles down to manage your cycles as an operator, you have to talk to who's operating the asset, who's controlling it and who's scheduling it. And what we learned real quickly was, you know, we're all following suit to the schedule, but the schedule sometimes is what's causing the cycles. And then if you just talk to the scheduler, they can schedule the, the asset just a hair differently to bring those cycles down. So typically what we learned was there's a lot of low hanging fruit just to get them in the same room to try to, um, bring the information to, to their level, to where they can understand what you're talking about, because sometimes integrity people talk a little differently than the controllers or talk a little differently than the scheduler.
So they try to get the information. I'll say it's even worse. It's even worse than that. I think Michael, I think sometimes we use the same language to say different things.
And, and I'm very serious about that. You know, I mean, I can use a lot of examples in my domain around automation controls and communication and all that where, you know, if I talk to a field automation guy and a measurement guy, I can use the same words, but they mean very different things, specifically in the specific technical details between the two parties that you're asking. That's a great point. You know, a lot of times those conversations on the surface, you think you're communicating, but when you unpack it, you're not, it's, it's actually worse than I don't understand.
It's, I think I understand, but I don't understand. Yeah, you're exactly right. It, it actually takes several meetings to get on the same page prior to being able to work on a specific project to lower cycles. Right.
And it might be as simple as something like instead of putting, you know, heavy product and light product back to back, I'm just going to move things around so that I don't, I don't cycle as quickly or as often. Right. I mean, you're exactly right, because even in between batches, you have a head pressure, which is a cycle. Right.
So that's a really good way to put it. Um, so we did, we had to get all four groups together. We had to get the data to where we all understood it. And real quick, we learned that we were all doing things against each other.
I'll give you another example too. Um, energy management. So we're trying to be more efficient on how we manage the energy consumption, but sometimes that creates cycles. So we had to bring that to the table as well to where we weren't all working against each other.
Yeah. So I think that's, that's, that's a different way, right? Is that everybody, every department's doing their best optimize, optimize their part of the business. But one of the things that you're pointing out here is in the discovery is that when everybody's optimizing their piece, they can be de-optimizing the system or de-optimizing one of the other groups.
Right. Yeah. That's a way to put it. Yeah.
So it really is a team effort. It totally is. And here if you write about the collaboration, the communication, learning different avenues to communicate, um, you know, we all work for the same team, but you don't really usually get together that often. Um, so putting those building blocks in place, going to their staff meetings and talking to them really helped out a ton.
Yeah. And it's a hard, it's a hard, hard discipline to implement and maintain. Yes, sir. Because it, it doesn't take very long and you start getting back into this place of, oh, I know what those guys need.
I'll just do my stuff and it's just tough. And, and, you know, each of us in our own disciplines, we've got, you know, a full-time job just and probably more so, you know, nobody hires anybody until I don't hire anybody until I need two people. So, so, you know, we all have more than we can do, right? This is part of it.
Yeah. So, um, you were talking about, um, earlier talking about some of the organizations talked about API, we've talked a little bit about liquids. How is this different for the gas operators? So the gas operators don't have the cycling issues that the liquid operators have, but they do have their challenges.
For one, you don't have a liquid in the pipe to couple the ultrasound signal that is generally used on the liquid operator side for managing cracks. So it's harder to get an ultrasonic tool through a gas line. Um, typically most of us are using ultrasonic shear wave as an ILI to find and manage and remediate our cracks. It's hard to do that in a gas line.
So we've recently, the industry's come up with EMAT technology and that's electromagnetic acoustical transducers that can be run in the pipe to find cracks without a medium, without the liquid. Um, so they don't have the pressure cycles. They don't typically have the seam issues that the liquid operators have, but they do have stress, corrosion, cracking issues that they're having to deal with, just like the liquid operators. Well, the hard part is is they don't have as many tools in their toolbox to manage that.
They have the D-MAT. Um, so on the liquid side, the shear wave crack ultrasonics is really the go to for us. So we haven't run that much E-MAT. The gas guys are starting to run a lot more E-MAT.
What would be interesting is really start blending those together. And I think that might be some of the evolution that you see later on or that we grow into. Well, it's more that data integration between technologies. Yeah, I think, I think you're going to, I think that you're absolutely right.
I think you're going to see a couple of things. Certainly we're going to see new technologies and new instrumentation packages and new, new ways of getting this data. Um, I think the other thing you're going to see is that we're going to see interesting combinations of instrumentation on a tool because there's value in gathering all that data together. Because even though I don't necessarily know exactly where it is on the pipe, I just, I know pretty much where it is on the pipe relative to other things versus separate tool runs, right?
And trying to get things overlaid the right way. Yes, sir. And then I think you're going to see a lot more interest in how do I pull this all together in a way that I can actually understand what this data means? How do I get this data into a context that I can look at it and have it be a resource for decision making around?
Where do I dig and where do I mitigate? Yes, sir. I think you're exactly right. And you'll speak of that technology.
There's a whole other piece to this that we haven't talked about. And that's the validation part. So when you do your excavation, you bring out a whole other technology base in the ditch to validate. Where those cracks are because you can't see them with an naked eye.
So you're bringing in in D E in the ditch. Yeah, non-destructive inspection. Yes, sir. Exactly.
Handheld stuff so that I can know I'm looking at this particular segment between this well and this well, I'm right here. That's exactly right. And we've seen some big challenges with the quality of in the ditch inspection. So we're having to tackle the in line inspection quality, but we're also having to tackle the in the ditch in D E quality as well.
So what kind of things are problems in the ditch? Well, you're typically dealing with thinner wall and a round pipe. So most of the technologies that have come up through the industry have been on flat plate or thicker acid basis. So like an inch thick or even greater.
So now we're parsing that down to a quarter inch wall and it's on an eight inch pipe that's round. And it is a lot more challenging to find defects with using ultrasonics from the outside of the pipe. Most of the handheld equipment is designed to be set on top of a plate and look down. Yes, sir.
Versus set underneath the round piece of metal and look up, for example, that's a good way to put it. And most of the qualifications that have come up through the industry have been on that thicker plate. Right. So we've learned that the that we need to have tighter specifications and tighter qualification, verification of qualifications on thinner metal and round metal.
So we've been putting that in place. We have another initiative through API where we're pushing the industry to use their samples to validate qualifications of pipeline defects and can the technicians find pipeline defects? Oh, wow. That sounds like a PRCI project right there.
Well, it'd be like it'd be like the ditch inspectors rodeo right there. Set up a whole bunch of different pipes, put them all in the ditch, fill them all half full of water and see who can find the defects. That's exactly right. And that's that's kind of what we've been doing is we've been all taken samples and storing them at the Technology Development Center at PRCI and we're inviting the NDE companies to validate their qualifications on pipeline defects.
Yeah. Yeah. That's that that right there is a very interesting subject itself about how that all works. And, you know, such it's it's to me that that gets really, really interesting because there's a lot of complexities for that as a vendor, right?
It's there's a lot of risk in doing those kind of things. Yeah, definitely. And what we learned recently was we started meeting with the product owners and they have a stake in the game with, you know, how their tools perform and then you meet with the the provider of the technology and the ditch and they're usually service providers and they have their own qualifications and then we have our standards as operators. So how do you blend all of that together and get on a common ground to improve the industry?
Well, and the and the guys that are making the tools are making those tools for multiple service providers and the service providers are providing those services for multiple operators. Yes, sir. And the operators all have their own unique requirements given their program and their pipe and their operations. So it's that again, there's a there's a whole other conversation there, but it does point out in the when you start talking about pipeline safety management and kind of these programs and such, it does point out why it's so important to get to industry standards and some consistency because that's the only way we as an industry are really going to move the needle to four nines.
You're exactly right. And I hope you see based on our conversation today, how massive crack management is. Yeah, you know, Michael, this is one of the reasons I wanted to get you on to talk because just in some of my work, I've been exposed on the peripheries of some of things. Around around crack management and frankly, I didn't understand the complexities, but this has been very helpful for me.
So I'm going to do something occasionally do I try to I try to come up with a couple of key takeaways. I think that one of my key takeaways is it's really not about finding cracks because all pipelines have cracks. It's understanding the nature of the cracks you have and how to manage your assets so that the cracks you have don't become a problem. So that's my first takeaway.
And my second takeaway is that's extraordinarily complex and it's a lot more than just what the integrity management folks do. So how do I do? Would you say that's a good summary of our last 30 minutes of chatting here? I think it is.
And you know that something you said on that point is we typically go to the integrity people to save us from the cracks, but the cracks are a lot bigger than just integrity. Exactly. Right. Good points.
Yeah, cool. Well, Michael, look, thanks so much for being our guest. I think we'd like to have you back and maybe unpack some of these other subjects and we'll work with you to get that get that schedule. That sounds great.
And thank you for your time. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of the pipeline is podcast and our conversation with Michael Stackhouse. Just a reminder before you go, you should register to win our customized pipeline is podcast. You had a tumbler simply visit pipeline is podcast.com slash went in yourself in the drawing.
If you would like to support this podcast, please leave us a review on Apple podcast, Google Play or whatever smart device podcast app you happen to use. You can find instructions at pipeline is podcast.com. If you have ideas, questions or topics, you'd be interested in, please let me know on the contact us page at pipeline is podcast.com. Reach out to me on LinkedIn.
Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you next week.