Welcome to the Pipe Liners Podcast, episode 53. The Pipe Liners Podcast where professionals, rubber keeks, 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 are giving away a customized Yeti Tumblr for one listener each episode. This week, our winner is Dan Sencel with Marathon Pipe Linen. Interestingly enough, Dan is also one of our guests this week. To learn how you can win this signature prize back, stick around until the end of the episode.
This week, we are very fortunate. We have three engineers from Marathon Pipeline that are going to join us and talk about API 1175 and Pipeline League Detection Program Management. So, Jason Dalton, Dan Sencel, and Kyle Miller. Welcome to the Pipe Liners Podcast.
Well, gentlemen, welcome to the Pipe Liners Podcast. It's such a pleasure to have you. We got a whole team today. I'm going to start a little differently.
I'm going to ask you guys maybe to take a second and each introduce yourself. Yeah, this is Dan Sencel with Marathon Pipeline. I am the League Detection Process Leader here. Hi, Russell, this is Jason Dalton.
I'm the League Detection and Hydraulic Supervisor from Marathon Pipeline. And this is Kyle Miller. I'm the Pressure Control Process Leader up here at Marathon Pipeline. Well, we are glad to have you guys.
Welcome again to the podcast. We're here to talk about API 1175. So maybe a good place to start here is, why don't you tell us what is API 1175 and how is it different than other League Detection Standards? Sure.
API 1175 is an outline of a management system for League Detection for Pipeline Operators. One of the differences of it is that most other API documents are kind of lists of go-dos and things that you can apply with. API 1175 is a little bit different and that it's very close to a management system. It is a management system, but it outlines various forms of League Detection Systems that you can use together to create an overall League Detection Strategy that fits an individual operators of capabilities, culture, and what their risk tolerance is.
So instead of prescribing that you should go do something, it lists all the possible things that you could do and how to generate a robust League Detection Culture and Strategy for your company. Yeah, so that to me, that's interesting because it gives the operator a lot of flexibility to discern what's appropriate. I think that probably leads to some complexity. If people are trying to figure out how to apply this, you think that's a fair comment?
Absolutely. As it's been rolled out, there's a lot of smaller operators that have asked, so what exactly do I do? How do I make sure that I'm in compliance with this? And the answer is there's no real way to be in compliance with this document since it's more of an outline on the things that you can do.
And it was written in a way to go at it from a perspective of how to meet it with what you've got. Dan's really been involved in trying to make sure that we comply with it for Marathon, so I'll hand it over to him on where he thinks a good starting point would be. Right, so I spent the last year with one of my major goals is getting a Marathon Pipeline compliant with API RV 1175. And I think there's a couple of key points you have to look at when you start now.
The first thing is to really get into the weeds and understand what are you currently doing for leak detection. What we found is that many of the different elements within 1175, we were actually doing those. We just didn't have robust documentation of them, and we really didn't have a way to tie them all together. All the different leak detection processes.
Yeah, that's actually a really interesting comment to me, Dan, because as I think a little bit about my experience, if you don't address leak detection as a program, I think it's fairly easy for the various things that you do to kind of end up in different silos or different departments within the company. There's a tendency or a propensity, if you will, to lose overall oversight of leak detection as a program. You think that's kind of a fair commentary? Yeah, that is the nail right on the head here.
We have aerial patrol, which is the great leak detection method we use. We have our RTTM software that we're involved with daily. And we also have our landowners and the interactions with landowners that are a big part of a leak detection strategy. Not necessarily the people we want to find a leak first, but they aren't our eyes on the ground.
So Russell, the other thing that we've considered is the fact that they've got 1130 handles, your CPM system 1149 handles your sensitivity around CPM. RP1175 is the first thing that starts to bring culture into the fold. And leak detection is kind of the synergy of the culture you've got, the technology you've got, and the processes you've got. For example, you can get an absolute state of the art leak detection system with all of the bells and whistles and the right technology.
But if the operators aren't being listened to directly, or you don't have the kind of culture that's going to listen to what the system's telling you, that investment in technology is really not benefiting you. Boy, that I think you just said a mouthful there. And that certainly tracks with my experience. You know, we tend to work more with smaller operators and where resources are at a premium and where people are wearing multiple hats.
And in particular, I think in those situations, it's very easy for, I'm kind of looking for something I can turn it on and forget about it versus it requires a level of care and feeding. And I think that's what you're getting at with is the comment on conversation about culture. Right. And I think one of the first things that you should do when you are looking to implement is API has provided a gap assessment tool.
It's a simple spreadsheet that you walk through and it has a bunch of questions related to each element. And you score yourself on it. And at the end, it tells you where you're weak and where you're strong. And that really helped us to identify the areas that we need to focus on to get ourselves in compliance and not just to get in compliance, but to improve our detection strategy here and help get that culture further along.
Yeah. I mean, ultimately, this is not a compliance conversation, right? This is a fiduciary responsibility conversation. Correct.
Now, the one thing the app assessment taught us is if we were going to do nothing else with this, what doing the gap assessment for RP 1175 did was Dan, I sat down, we looked through all of the requirements that were in there, and we can kind of look at each other and say, yeah, we do do that. And then because you're not filling out this gap assessment, you can do the realization we don't have that written down anywhere that Dan and I do that during the course of our day to day business or the DOC does that. So if something would happen to us, we move on to a new position, that thing that we're doing or that some other departments are doing that really raising the bar on our lead detection system, if that's not written down and documented, it's not sustainable. And RP 1175 really pushed us to document that to make sure that everybody understood that that was going on.
Yeah. And again, I think you might come to an excellent point, the idea of whatever we're doing to run our lead detection program, it needs to be sustainable. And it needs to be the kind of thing we can incrementally improve. So was there anything else that came out of the gap assessment for you guys that was kind of an aha?
I would say, as we said, the biggest thing was that we didn't have something that tied everything together. API 1175 talks about a strategy document, and we didn't have that. We didn't have a overall strategy document outlined. This is what we do for lead detection here in marathon pipeline.
Everybody understood their role and everybody was out doing their tasks, but there wasn't that high level document that said, you know, this is how we do it. And that's one thing we completed last year to help move us along the improvement continuum. Right. And that other thing that did for us was, first look at this, it's another guiding document you're kind of looking through it thinking we're going to have to spool up lots of new processes departments.
And as we read it and studied it really marries up nicely with SM safety management system, API 1173. And a lot of the things that we put in place for that just naturally dovetailed into 1175. In terms of our management change system, our reliability, reliability center maintenance, how we handle issues in the company, was kind of eye opening to see how the two management systems work together to increase our overall level of responsiveness. Yeah, we've been doing I've been doing several episodes recently on API 1173 and pipeline safety management.
And these are these are certainly first cousins, if not brothers sister, you know, they're very, and they're really both of these are kind of the first four rays of API of management system standards. So it's a little different than what I think we classically think of API doing, which is more of that this is how you do it kind of kind of thing. So if you were talking to an operator that's getting started with 1173, what might you advise them to be cautious about in terms of here's the things you might miss or the things you might want to pay close attention to. So I'm starting an operator starting up 1175.
I think the first thing I would say is don't think that this is going to lead you to do an investment in a lot of technology. You need to fully consider the things you're already doing in the course of your day to day business that are forms of the detection that you don't normally think of as a detection. You know, if you've got right away area patrol going on, that's a form of lead detection. And if you've got a system where your risk tolerance says all you need to do is area patrol, you don't need to really be scared of this.
You need to use it to your advantage and document that as you are following your risk tolerance to make sure that you are operating in a safe manner. Right. One of the conversations that's come up around 1173 and I suspect it's also true with 1175. But I'll put the question out to you guys is that it seems like one of the benefits is once you've kind of done this assessment, you now have a better idea of where to apply resources.
Does that foot with one of the things that came out of y'all doing the gap assessment? Yeah, definitely. That really is what hold us where to go do for the next year. Yeah.
And when we combine this with our internal operating system of a plan to check adjust, we this fits right together to where we have that continuous improvement. And so by establishing where we are, now we can identify the things we need to improve. And then we use that gap assessment now every year and we re-score it and look at where we improved. Is there anywhere that we've actually taken a step back with policy changes or what changes within the company that we need to go and look at again?
So thus that gap assessment is really the metric by which we're storing our lead detection program with the other KPIs under that as we're identified in 1175. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That makes a lot of sense to me.
So I think where I'd like to go in a conversation from here is the nature of this is it's a program, it's a management system, and it's designed so that each operator can uniquely apply it. To me that kind of comes with some challenges that the fact that it gives you that kind of flexibility. How much flexibility or how broad is the spectrum I want to ask about the ability to uniquely apply? As far as I'm concerned, it's very broad on this particular guiding document.
Like I said, smaller operators that do not have a lot of resources to put into this and have very low risk tolerances and aerial patrol or even a right-way survey is adequate for larger operators that have the existing technology and are gathering all of the field of elementary, it outlines how a CPM system can be used effectively. It really comes down to what your individual exposure is and even more than that it ties down to what kind of existing assets you've got. There are some companies that if you've got a really robust I.O.I. program, that can be considered a form of lead detection because you're routinely patrolling your lines through integrity assessments.
Yeah. As long as you make a concerted effort to go through and study what you're doing and how it applies to lead detection, this is a very wide open document. I'd add in there that there's no pass fail in this document. So it is here are guidelines on how to lay out your program and think the most important thing is to identify where you are, do the gap assessment, be open in it, be honest, you may have some really high scores with high gaps.
But the real key takeaway from the whole system is you know what you're doing, you're documenting what you're doing, and you're looking to improve at your rear. If somebody's brand new, what would you tell them, once they've done the gap analysis, what do you think is next? And say taking your results from the gap analysis and looking at your high scores and identifying what are the things we can do right away to improve these. And if you just look at the questions that are part of that gap assessment, it will point you in the right direction of what is the key piece you're missing.
So in our case, it was the overall strategy document. So we went off straight away from the gap assessment and worked to put that strategy document together and bring together all the different processes within our company that are doing leak detection. So what was the value, I mean, why did the strategy document rise to the top? What value from a leak detection standpoint did the strategy document create for you guys?
The strategy document allowed us to identify everybody that was involved in our leak detection process, make sure that we were keeping them on board with changes. In the past, as a leak detection team, I would say it went as far as the technology went. And we would make changes to our real-time transient models and our SCADA systems kind of in the vacuum. And there were times that the lifeliers and the integrity groups could have really used that information.
And identifying it all through a strategy document gave us the who, what, when, why, and where, who didn't notify that we were making changes and who to ask for input on potential changes that we could be making. And it also really helped us with onboard new assets to make sure that we're talking to the right people about what the needs are going to be of the company from the leak detection perspective as we bring that asset into the fold. I'm wondering how far you actually moved the needle just by doing the work to write the strategy document. Because obviously, you had to do a lot of investigation and conversation and discovery around things that were, you know, you may have not been intimate with before you started the process.
So how far do you think you moved the needle? I'd say it was a step change for us. Really? Just just by doing strategy.
Because it opened up those avenues of talking to all the other groups and looking at our leak detection as a holistic approach to understanding the interactions between line patrol and ILI data and our RTTM models. Also identified that we had a lot more stakeholders involved in our leak detection system than just those people that were actually doing a leak detection identified that our field personnel are a big part of how our leak detection systems perform. And so that actually identified that we need to go out and do some training. So we've now trained all of our field technicians on what our leak detection system is and how they can impact it in their day-to-day operation.
Wow. Yeah, that's a that to me that's a huge takeaway. It's not surprising when you say it, but it wouldn't have come top of mind if we weren't having this conversation. Because I think when people talk about leak detection, they tend to be thrown to it's a conversation about technology.
And what you're saying is yes, that's part of it, but probably as important if not more important is about corporate culture. Absolutely. If you had to weigh it, the vast majority of a good leak detection program is a good culture. You need operators on the systems that understand that they need to think leak first.
They need to be able to understand what's going on. And you need technicians in the field to understand that when they're removing transmitter from service, they're degrading more than just the ability to see a pressure. They could be stopping a leak detection system. And the ILI group needs to understand that they need to tailor their tools at sometimes to the condition the lines in.
So if we've got really good leak detection, that means different things to how the system is operating. Really, the technology, I would say, is probably the absolute smallest part of it. Or as an industry, I think it's technology schooling that everybody's first pass at any problem is we just need to computer it up. And that's not necessarily the best answer.
More complex information coming in needs more complex training for people to understand it. If you don't pick that up, it's just a nice looking point. Yeah. Well, and this sounds very familiar to a safety conversation.
Safety is a cultural thing. It requires leadership and it requires management and it requires process. But if you're going to really be good at it as a company, everybody in the company has to be leaning into that. And you can't give it lip service.
It has to be real. It has to mean something operationally, which is what I hear y'all saying in your examples about how you went out and you've done training and who you're training and what you're training on. I mean, that to me is that's a big deal. That right there is where if I was only talking to a small operator, it's the first thing I would say is you don't go back to what I said earlier, you don't need to invest in the latest and greatest technology.
Your investment needs to be in training the people out on site and training your operators and start there because in terms of the most efficient use of your your budget, training and making sure that you've got a good culture will far away outweigh infrastructure or technology. Yes, absolutely. I would absolutely agree with that. So this is not really a trick question, but I think it's an appropriate question.
What is the appropriate performance standard for leak detection? It's a really good question. What we look for here is the right balance between false alarms and sensitivity. And that is something that changes over time.
We haven't actually established a firm pass fail for that yet. Right now we're just looking at improving it year over year. And that can change based on how a system operates or what the pipe integrity is like on a certain system. You may be willing to have more false alarms on a pipe that you're worried about from an integrity standpoint in order to get your sensitivity down.
So these are things that we go over here as part of our internal process where we review our thresholds and go through evaluations on whether or not they should be lowered further tuned further based on leak leak alarm rates. Yeah, so what you're saying is that it's a risk evaluation and an effort evaluation. I'm going to translate what I heard you say. That's fair.
And it also goes back to the communication that we were talking about. We can stay on our side of the room and look at our CPM displays and see what alarms we're seeing. But we're not seeing everything that's going on on an operational console on a day to day basis. And one alarm when a console that's got tons of other business going on, that's a big impediment to that operator doing his order job correctly.
Whereas another console with not a lot going on, they can probably handle a lot more nuisance alarms. So getting feedback from the end user is really what we're trying to add is to say, okay, operation center, what do you need from this system so that you can perform at the right level? Yeah. Well, and I think ultimately the answer to my question, the standard is zero releases.
Just like the standard in a safety program is zero injuries, right? Now I might not achieve that standard, you know, from a safety perspective, I might not be able to achieve that with perfection forever. But I can do it for a day, might be able to do it for a week. I think it's the same kind of thing except that the other part in what you guys are getting at is, well, when and if I do have a leak, I want to find it and take appropriate mitigation activity as quickly as I possibly can, even for a small leak.
So, I think your answer is right. But I think it's also fair to say that we need to set a standards in this domain, things that may not be absolutely achievable, but they're the only standard that makes sense to work towards. I absolutely agree. Yeah.
I don't think there's any point where we in industry will get to a situation where say, well, we're good here. We probably don't need to push the envelope any further. Absolutely. Absolutely.
You could take the same analogy to the aircraft industry or other industries that are dealing with critical infrastructure. You know, the standards need to be what standards are and we got to get better. That's our job. Yeah.
Well, this is gentlemen, this has been really interesting. So, I'm going to kind of try and wrap this up with some what I think are the key takeaways. So, first, I think the first key takeaway is that 1175 is not a regulatory requirement. It's a management system practice.
I think the second key takeaway is got to do the gap analysis to determine what's the appropriate way for you as an operator to implement 1175. And it's probably going to be a little bit different for every operator. And then lastly, this is not about technology. This is about culture.
It's about how an operator you know, equips its people to do leak detection as part of their overall job. That sound reasonable to you guys. I do a good enough job of summarizing that out. They can help us.
What would you like to add that I missed? I think I'd like to add that everybody is doing what they can to ensure the safety of the general public with these pipelines. Lead detection is a risk mitigation. It needs to work with the existing integrity programs that are out there.
You know, risk is consequence and likelihood. And what we're trying to do with lead detection is reduce the consequences by minimizing the amount of fluid out of the pipe. We have really good integrity guidelines. The industry is following and integrity guidelines should match up well with leak detection, lower the overall risk across the industry.
Yeah, that's that's that's extremely well said that, you know, leak detection is a consequence mitigation effort. It's the inline inspection, the integrity management that is a don't have the outcome effort. So those two things have to work in conjunction with one another. So I think that's an excellent point.
Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for coming on board. I'll just tell the listeners that we we are planning to bring this group back to bring to talk about some other subjects around leak detection and pipeline hydrology. So stick around and we'll have the threesome from marathon come back and join us again. So thank you guys for joining us.
Thank you, Rose. Thanks, Rose. Thanks. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of the pipeline podcast and our conversation with Dan, Jason and Kyle.
Just a reminder before you go, you should register to win our customized pipeline podcast Yeti Tumblr. Simply visit pipelineerspodcast.com slash win to enter yourself in the drawing. If you would like to support this podcast, please leave a review on Apple podcast, Google Play, or whatever smart device podcast app that you use. You can find instructions at pipelineerspodcast.com.
If you have ideas, questions or topics you'd be interested in, please let us know on the contact us page at pipelineerspodcast.com or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Thanks again for listening. I'll talk to you next week.