With 660,000 kilometres of pipelines in Western Canada — equivalent to the amount of public roads — pipeline and oil and gas companies have a massive amount of data that needs to be managed, a seminar on asset integrity management heard Monday.

And that’s increasingly important for companies that are looking to maximize their assets at a time when it’s essential they reduce their costs, speakers told a JWN Speaker Series event sponsored by Siemens. The Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) has required companies to have an asset integrity program since 2007 and now is working on mandatory integrity management systems, while the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association (CEPA) has established a specific program, Integrity First, the seminar was told.

“Asset management really begins with asset intelligence,” said Brian Hall, president of GDM Inc., which provides pipeline, facility, midstream and transportation information. “Asset intelligence really speaks to how well you know, and what you potentially don’t know, about your assets.”

“Strong asset management is basically trying to be proactive and optimizing day-to-day operations and developing a system that is going to save you money in the long run,” added Milan Saric, senior advisor of pipelines at the AER. “It’s not a system in which the benefits are immediately visible.”

GDM has heard from industry that there are two questions people habitually struggle with: “What do I own and where are those actual assets,” said Hall.  

The Holy Grail of asset integrity management, Hall suggested, is knowing the assets and how they are connected — knowing what wells feed into which pipelines, which pipelines go into which facilities, carrying which products and what products go where.

Risks and challenges

Companies also need to have an understanding of the risks to their assets, said Hall. GDM draped a set of hydraulic information on its pipeline database and found 256,000 water crossings in Western Canada — flowing water and standing water of which 33,000 kilometres of pipeline is under water today. “This could be a challenge,” he said. There also are a significant number of road and rail crossings.

Saric also emphasized the importance of risk awareness. “I cannot stress how important it is to say that industry, in general, really underestimates the risk that may happen to their operations,” he said.

One of the challenges in asset management is the lack of access to the information — not simply the ability to log in, but the dispersed nature of the information, and the need to bring it together and manage it well, according to Hall. For example, while information may be on a network drive, it may also be on someone’s hard disk or in a filing cabinet or perhaps with a consultant.

Further exacerbating the problem is the number of divestitures, mergers and joint ventures in the industry. “The fact remains that as assets swap hands so quickly, seldom does the information about those assets swap hands.”

In his presentation, Hall singled out two trends that companies should be looking at for more effective, profitable integrity management: access and integration and relationships.

Access starts with getting to the point where all teams have the ability to be able to access a control central area, enabling them to make common decisions.

“It’s not just simply having a mapping tool that you can put layers of information on, it’s having the ability to tie all these layers together to basically … make assessments on this information.”

Product lifecycle management

“To … extract as much value from those assets as possible, we need to marry the physical assets with the digital twin that goes with those assets,” added John Lusty, senior account executive in Calgary for global sales and services in the Siemens PLM Software industry group. “Only until we have good control of both our physical and digital assets are we really able to maximize the innovation that we need to get from our assets, especially these days for the owner/operators when it is absolutely essential that we get our costs down.” 

When it comes to integrity asset management there’s still lots of work to be done, said the AER’s Saric. When the Alberta regulator introduced its integrity management program in 2007, many companies simply hired a company to do an IMP for them. “How well they actually followed through is questionable; I can only guess.”

The AER has decided to develop a system that includes a form that will be signed by the top official committing to follow through with a management system. The program is not just for big companies; the regulator wants all owners to assess the potential risk of their operations, and to be aware of the risk, and run a safe operation.

The next step will be to approach certain companies and to engage them. “Our approach is really to work together with industry,” he said. “We are not trying to be a policeman, really. We want to help industry and not force the issue.”

Plans call for the system rollout to begin later this year, starting slowly then rolled out to all licensees.

Integrity First

At CEPA, the senior leaders of the 12-member companies from federally-regulated pipelines recently signed off on the principles and policy statements related to Integrity First and an implementation plan that will take it to 2020 and beyond, said director Coral Lukaniuk.

The first performance report was released in 2015 and this year’s report will really show the progress that has been made, she said.

“It’s all about being transparent about what we are doing; ultimately the goal is zero incidents and increasing the public trust.”

The key focus areas for improved management and performance in pipeline integrity are design and construction, hazard identification and management and risk assessment.

Third-party verification also will start later this year with the Emergency Management priority area.