Control room operators and pipeline integrity engineers both play vital roles in protecting pipelines and maintaining safe operations. On the newest episode of Pipeline Things, Christopher De Leon and Rhett Dotson are joined by Russel Treat from the Pipeline Podcast Network to discuss control room management. Rhett, Chris, and Russel discuss what control room management looks like, how control room operations and integrity management are related, what consequences can result from improper management, and what steps need to be taken when failure occurs.
Highlights:
- What is the relationship between control room and integrity management in pipeline failures?
- What is the rupture rule?
- Where are we seeing the most innovation in control room management?
- How do integrity, control room, and operations management departments collaborate to avoid system failure?
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All right on this episode of Pipeline Things we get into the control room and we have a very special guest, the one who started the spark that created the fire that is making Pipeline Things, even if that wasn’t his intention.
Christopher De Leon
The mustard seed.
Rhett Dotson
Even if that wasn’t his original intent, let me ask you a question. How familiar are you with control room management, specifically the role that was created in 2007? And its full adoption in 2012, or have you ever heard of the rupture rule and its impact on control room management? Or maybe have you ever thought about how closely related integrity management, pipeline integrity management, and what happens in the control rooms are, we get into that. It’s a great episode today. We hope you enjoy it and on this episode of Pipeline Things
Christopher De Leon
What are you doing?
Rhett Dotson
I was trying to do my own dance this time. You get to make up a dance and I don’t get to make
Christopher De Leon
If you’re going to do it have some rhythm or I am going to this, where he says right here, right here buddy.
Rhett Dotson
You know what? We’re going to let we’re going to let the audience judge the quality of the dance that I threw down. They can rate it like leave your comments on LinkedIn or on the YouTube channel on what you think of Rhett’s Sweet Dance moves. Sweet. So, hey, today, you know, it’s going to be an exciting episode. We have a great guest coming on talking about all the things I am pumped about this episode. But the Segway
Christopher De Leon
It’s possible that it’s his fault that we have Pipeline Things. We have kind of talked about this.
Rhett Dotson
Oh he is directly responsible.
Christopher De Leon
Like he was kind of the gateway drug for me.
Rhett Dotson
He tampered with something and it went way beyond what he expected
Christopher De Leon
You know how some people picked up habits during COVID, like, you know, they’re like and it kind of, like, transformed them, like and because of COVID I got to do this. Like, because of COVID we took on podcasts like we got some benefit out of it.
Rhett Dotson
Yeah, for sure. But, you know, that wasn’t the only time, you know, somebody played with something and maybe it went a little further than they thought. You guys had fun. Family. I know. I have to do this. I know your sign. I told Amanda was going on the podcast.
Christopher De Leon
This is memorialized now because once this airs, like, it’s not coming off the internet
Rhett Dotson
It’s not for sure.
Christopher De Leon
We could play this at my kid’s wedding or something. Tell everybody it happened. Come on, be vulnerable, Share family time. You guys
Christopher De Leon
You guys know that we use the podcast to update y’all on what’s happening in casa De Leon or at the Dotson’s and so we have a newborn Mateo and so we’re experienced at you know the whole baby number game and so Amanda I mean has done a great job of getting all of these things to help her be more efficient being a mom.
Rhett Dotson
Yeah.
Christopher De Leon
So, she has this whole setup of, like, these bottle washers now, different sizes, different tools and all this. And so, I’m working. And I just here Amanda yelling. I mean, you just you hear the commotion and you can know you want to you my wife’s pitch when something is going on. And I hear Leo screaming, my five year old, he is screaming and I am like oh god, so I run over there I get over there and the bottle washer is stuck in the back of his head and he is screaming
Rhett Dotson
For those who don’t have kids, the bottle washer is like a Dremel tool with a brush attached to it.
Christopher De Leon
And so, my son’s been growing out his hair because his buddy has long hair, so it’s probably about seven or eight inches long. Yeah, and it’s still spinning, it’s spinning, he doesn’t know how to turn it off and it’s stuck in his hair. So, the whole house is loud, I finally get it out, he is missing a solid 2×3 chunk in the back of his head.
Rhett Dotson
Let’s just say now that he’s played with that toy, he is never playing with that toy again.
Christopher De Leon
I thought about giving him a buzz cut just to kind of fix it.
Rhett Dotson
I bet you it’s still tender back there. I bet you if you go touch his head that the whole areas still like really tender.
Christopher De Leon
Yeah, it was very interesting.
Rhett Dotson
Yeah. So, if you if you have you talked to Kristen in this time period. She seems stressed out or tired. It’s because you don’t know what chaos happened at Casa De Leon early on.
Christopher De Leon
You know what someone told me, why would you start a business and have a baby the same year?
Rhett Dotson
I’m real curious how you answered that question.
Christopher De Leon
Yolo right, Yolo
Rhett Dotson
I think it’s time, I want to leave as much time as possible for the person who played with fire who created the podcast we have today. We owe an appreciable thanks for what he did for us. So, without further ado, I think we need to introduce Russell treat back, you know, not back on our podcast but onto our podcast.
Welcome.
Russel Treat
So good to be here guys. I was appreciating the little dance; I was thinking I might come through with a little Cotton Eye Joe. But you know something guys this doesn’t feel quite right, just one second
Rhett Dotson
Okay. Unplanned moments on the Pipeline Things Podcast.
Christopher De Leon
Sarah did you approve this?
Rhett Dotson
I thought we had a producer for a reason. If you’re not watching on YouTube. I think this is the definition
Russel Treat
That feels so much better to see. So much more appropriate.
Rhett Dotson
Russell, would you like to reintroduce the podcast? I mean, at this point it feels like it’s no longer Pipeline Things with your host Rhett Dotson and Christopher De Leon. I’d like to welcome you to the Pipeline podcast Network with your hosts Russell Treat and your guests Christopher De Leon and Rhett Dotson.
Russel Treat
That’s so awesome. This is never going to get old, thank you for letting me bring the backdrop. I appreciate that, guys. And thank you for the kind words. You know, it’s really interesting about the whole podcast thing. You know, we’re not really competitors, you know. Absolutely. You know, we’re all trying to do the same thing. We’re all trying to put together information for the industry, help people do a better job of being pipeliners and it’s all good. So anyways, great to be here. Thanks for having me and thanks for letting me bring the back drop
Rhett Dotson
It was unannounced but yeah, we’ll roll with it. So, it is really great to have you all on Russell And you’re absolutely right. Like your content and our content are both complimentary and great. You know, I mean, this past week I came across an I’ll call it out your episode. I don’t remember the number. It was the one with Michael East on hydrogen. And I loved the dialog that you and Michael had on hydrogen and sometimes not always being like you presented, this is what I think is going to happen. And then Michael said, this is what the industry is trying to get to. And it was a great example of something we probably wouldn’t tackle, but really enjoyed listening.
Russel Treat
I really like to do that stuff where I don’t agree 100%. Yes, which is perfect. No, no, I, I think we learned hearing that that that conflict we work better if there’s engagement and disagreement. But, you know, honest, intellectual, thoughtful disagreement.
Christopher De Leon
Yeah. Yeah. So, to keep our partnership. Rhett and I healthy. I always try to keep us in debate and not arguing and there is a difference.
Russel Treat
Well, its healthy conflict, there’s a gentleman who works in my business called Scott Williams, and Scott William and I have worked together for well longer than either of us care to admit. And we’ll get in a room and we’ll be we’ll be flushing out something we need to do on the roadmap. And we’ll come, you know, people will walk by and all those guys are like in there fighting and they’re right we are. But we come out and we’re laughing and shaking hands and they don’t get it, look, you guys don’t get it. We’re not fighting each other. We’re fighting together for something, right?
Christopher De Leon
It is kind of like us talking about cybersecurity, policies.
Rhett Dotson
And our employees are like, mom and dad are fighting again. What do we do?
Russel Treat
Cybersecurity. The gift that keeps on giving.
Rhett Dotson
Boy, you’re not lying. So what? Hey, we brought you in for a very specific reason this time around, and I’d like to give you a chance to talk, because most of you will know you as the original pipeline podcaster. But our thought in bringing you on this this week specifically had to do with dealing with the control room. And if you don’t mind, I’d like to give you the floor for a little bit and let you describe your background and experiences, like why would we bring you on as the expert in control rooms?
Russel Treat
Yes, So yeah, thanks for that. You know, it’s awesome to be a guest. It’s kind of a pleasant change of pace. So
Rhett Dotson
Is there conflict in your mind? Where’s he going? Is he leading this right?
Russel Treat
So, my background, I’m an engineer by education civil, but I’ve worked in software since really the late or early eighties. I was in the first Air Force unit to automate all order and job order process. When I got out of the military, I worked in cryogenics for a bit and then I worked for a software company where we would find engineering software and commercialize it. I did that for a bunch of years and then transitioned into running a software company doing custody transfer measurement back office. So, custody transfer measurement, that’s where you got a meter. And the fluid is changing ownership and that’s somebody looking at that measurement and making sure it’s correct. And then that feeds into the general journal or the invoicing or whatever. So that’s kind of how I grew up in the business, right? And when I got into oil and gas, and I started doing measurement. I loved it. I ran a software company doing that back-office stuff for about seven years. I left and started inter-service. I started out doing measurement. That’s when EFM was just starting to get big. So, everybody was putting in radio network and collecting the data.
Rhett Dotson
EFM?
Russel Treat
Electronic flow measurement. Thank you. Yeah, getting off of charts and moving to the electronics, particularly the big transmissions systems that were adapting the work order 636 which was started in the early nineties. It changed the big transmission gas companies from buyers and sellers of gas to transporters of gas. Right? So, measurement and daily measurement started becoming really important. So that led to looking at the automation, all that kind of stuff. And then people started wanting to put that information on screens in the offices, and then that led to control room and then I, you know, after doing Control Room for about ten years, the whole FEMSA control room management rule came out.
Rhett Dotson
What time frame is this?
Russel Treat
So, Control room management was originally coming out in 2007. Right. And it became effective in 2010 and fully effective in 2012. So, during that period of time, we were looking at what do we need to do to do a better job in the control room for regulated pipelines? What is this rule going to mean? What kind of software tools, what kind of processes are they going to need? And we started building product for that. At that same time, I was also starting to look at leak detection because whenever you start looking at a regulated liquid pipeline, leak detection is one of the requirements. So, my, my kind of technical path started with measurement, moved into telecoms, moved into HMI and then started looking at alarm management, high performance human machine interface and leak detection. Right. And that’s so I’ve kind of become an expert in those fields because it easily builds up on all the other stuff. Yeah. So that’s a little bit about my background and how I got to know petroleum. I probably put control rooms in for more than a dozen regulated pipelines and I’ve been involved with close to 30 different pipeline operations and some and, quite a bit of detail.
Rhett Dotson
Wow. So, appreciate that background. So, help me understand a little bit. I’ve had less awareness of the control room. I’ve been in probably two or three control rooms. But what really sparked this was when we went through the NTSB failure arc that we did, I was very surprised by the important role the control room played in some notable failures. And I feel sometimes like integrity management is a bit removed from the control room sometimes. But when you talk about a failure, both come into play. There’s an integrity management component that usually plays a role in the failure and then the control room usually plays a role in the failure. And I’m curious what your what’s your opinion of the role between, you know, integrity management, the control room.
Russel Treat
Such a great it’s such a great question.
Rhett Dotson
All I do is ask great questions.
Russel Treat
Yeah, no it goes to how I say this. The pipeline world is very technical and we operate in a lot of hyper vertical domains and somebody who’s doing like deep in the weeds integrity management and they’re doing life calculations and risk calculation and miscalculations and all of that, determining what to dig and when to dig and all that stuff. You know, they’re so deep in that detail that it’s sometimes hard to look to see the overview of how the pipeline company, how it all fits together. Right. So, the way I say this and I’m I said this all the time I am not an integrity guy but I work closely now with a number of integrity groups on various projects and integrity management is about leak prevention. Control room management as it relates to leaks is about leak detection and response. So, if you look at some of the major incidents we’ve had in the last ten, 15 years, the control room contribution has not been the incident itself. Nope. But the scope and scale of the consequence where the control room didn’t do nearly as good a job as it could have done to mitigate the outcome. So, you know, integrity management is trying to prevent leaks, control room management is trying to mitigate consequences.
Christopher De Leon
It’s a perfect way to paint a picture for us. If you guys are thinking like, they’re good friends, that’s what makes sense to bring Russell on it. In fact, no, I mean, it just happened organically. Yes, we went through a handful of failures, and that’s exactly what we did. We’re very vertical on the on the integrity side. We start somewhere and we real deep. And we’re like, okay, well, guys, will you look at how they could have responded to this feature or the risk management side of probability failure really more than anything, right. The consequence. So that was probably more abstract. And you’re right, we identified maybe we could have done a little bit better job on of consequence side. And so here you are.
Russel Treat
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it’s interesting if, you know, you can look at some specific incidents and one that’s probably most people are familiar with is the Marshall Incident. And in that incident in particular, you know, there were integrity management issues. But the reason that that incident was the scale of the incident was what it was, was they in the control room. They were struggling with trying to understand do they have a leak or do they have slack line?
Rhett Dotson
Is that what they called columned separation?
Russel Treat
Yeah, same thing. Okay. Slack line call. Column That’s basically when the liquid converts to the vapor given the hydraulics of what’s going on inside the line. So, and, you know, that’s one of the big challenges with leak detection is doing what’s called CPM, which is a computational pipeline modeling. So, you’re taking the data from the data system, you’re running it into a big math model and is performing calculations and you’re looking at imbalances over one minute, 5 minutes, 20 minute, right. And if those imbalances get too big, you’re like, this could this, this I’m going to alarm, this is a leak. But the challenges of the leak alarms, we get very few of are actually real leaks. They’re normally some other kind of operational upset that causes the leak detection algorithm to flag something.
Rhett Dotson
And that’s really where I want to go with you today, because you’re hitting on so many things that I remember reading in Marshall, you’re right, is good example. I think there are some like 60 alarms. It was an incredible number of alarms that they were faced with in this the story, the way it played out, even reading the NTSB report, it was it was it was awesome to recount it on the episode because I was like I could see myself sitting right there where they were dealing with conflicting information, conflicting opinions. But it played out similarly in other ones, right. Like even in Bellingham, you had challenges with restarting the pipeline and asking questions about whether or not they had a leak in. You had the control room in San Bruno where they were debating whether or not it was an airliner that had crashed. And, you know, you had a solid I think it was 90 minutes, but you had at least 20 minutes where they had the data to believe that they had no upstream pressure increase on the downstream. So, they were still sitting there rationalizing, do we have a leak?
Russel Treat
If you look at the Southern California, Huntington Beach offshore, the same thing, they were having a whole bunch of process upsets on the pipelines that mast you know, they were getting leak, but they were also simultaneously having process upsets. And it took him a while to figure out they actually had a leak so that, you know, and FEMSA put out the you know, the rupture detection rule. And they they’ve set some criteria now about what an operator supposed to do. And you know, without getting into all the detail around it, basically what they’ve said is you need you got 30 minutes from the time you think you had you might have a leak until you shut the pipeline.
Rhett Dotson
You know what? This is a good time to take a break. I actually want to take a break. And when we get back, I want to actually dive into that rupture detection rule a bit more and ask you something about the regulations that you mentioned between 2011 and 2012 and talk about how it’s impacted the control rooms. So, stay with us. We’ll be right back in just a bit as we continue this conversation.
Rhett Dotson
All right. Welcome back to this edition of the Pipeline. Podcaster slash pipeline things. What? What? What pipeline show are we on? Do we know? Do we settle it?
Russel Treat
I think we’re actually on pipeline things, I’m the guest. I’m clearly happy to be here.
Rhett Dotson
We are having so much fun with this. But I want you to know every time there will be a show now and I see you set up with a camera and a mic, I’m going sit down respectfully.
Christopher De Leon
I have maybe a comment slash question. So, I mean, you know, we consider ourselves integrity SME’s, and I can’t help but find this parallel in that from an integrity perspective, you know, we talk about a lot on our podcast. It’s dealing with uncertainty, dealing with integrating data to make the best decisions possible. And one example of that is dealing with an ILI report with getting these features that you’re having to decipher almost with the information you have, what I respond to and I can only imagine someone in the control room is often doing that. And we saw this in the failure files, you know, how are these guys, you know, over and over the course of the last meeting called four or five major incidents, how are they now better equipped or better trained or, you know, how was that process changed for them to hone in on what matters?
Russel Treat
Yeah. So, talk a little bit about what’s in the control room management rule to address that. That’s been around now ten years and there’s a level of maturity starting to happen in the control room. There’s been a lot of change. Two key things there. One is what they call adequate information. So adequate information is the idea that I got to make sure the control room, the controller has appropriate for that situational awareness. Right. That’s a big, big subject. And part of that is what you put on the screen and how you put it on the screen for them. But it’s also all these other systems they have access to. Plus, what other communications are you giving them? So that’s one aspect. The other aspect is alarm management, right. Meaning and this comes out Bellingham specifically because Bellingham occurred in the midst of alarm, flood alarm, being so many alarms coming in control and I can’t make head or tails out of them so that I can actually respond to something, Right. Yeah. So was there has been a whole lot to kind of separate out, these are the things that are really the safety related alarms versus all the other things I might need to know about. Right. To make that stand out, that those things are going have gotten a lot better in the last ten years.
Christopher De Leon
So how is it in regulation? Right. So, when something when you said adequate information, we have a very similar process in ILI so when you get an ILI report, you have to issue discovery and different operators and even different, I’ll say the police force of regulation. Right. So, the auditors will have their own interpretation of how and when to issue discovery. So, an example, some operators will say we have to issue discovery within five days of receiving a report.
Russel Treat
if you kind of raise the if you kind of raise up the altitude of the question, you talk about quality management standpoint. Yes. I’ve got to get from data to information from information decisions. Right. Same thing in the control room
Rhett Dotson
Did you pay him for that?
Russel Treat
This isn’t new, man. This has been around for 50 years. This comes right out of work with Deming. Right. So, it’s the same thing in the control room. You know what high-performance HMI is a about and alarm management is about is practice that’s been developed and it’s been around for a long time. And now being applied, the pipeline to do that yet.
Christpher De Leon
So in on the integrity space, we see that from an ILI like you have to issue discover There’s a maximum of 180 days and now there’s beginning to be some interpretations around. Well you can’t just use the whole 180 days, you can’t just sit on your hands and issue discovery. Is there anything in regulation from a control room side where it’s like you need to have adequate information and respond by X time.
Russel Treat
Yeah. So the rupture rule in my in my opinion is an attempt to do that. So, when you start talking about leaks, right, just you got kind of a there’s different types right here. So, rupture the rupture rule gives the operator the ability to define for you what is rupture. What I would say a rupture is, is it’s a full loss of integrity and containment Right, that that’s more of an ILI definition. The definition in the control room is something like a pressure change of this much over this period of time. Right. Kind of put in the terms of the systems that they use. But what the bottom line is a big leap for the loss is a great way to help get that message across. Right. So that so the rupture also if you get one of those, you need to shut down in 30 minutes. So, you have to have a mechanism of defining it. You have to have a mechanism of responding and that there’s got to be some mechanism to have a lock. Now you have to have all the valves closed, all the fluids stop where all the valves, all the valves on the entire system between pump station rupture around the rupture. So upstream, downstream, the way that’s done is they’ll isolated entire segment.
Christopher De Leon
Okay, my next natural question I have is, is 30 minutes enough time.
Russel Treat
Yeah, it is.
Rhett Dotson
Yeah, I so I mean I have it it’s really interesting. You mentioned leak versus rupture and we saw that play out like in Centreville where the leak in that dent was 400 times less than what they could actually detect. I can appreciate that the difference between a leak and a rupture but your rupture rule. I want to ask you about that because you’ve described it twice now in this episode. And when I hear it, I think me and that sounds that sounds I’m going to use the word heavy handed, but not in a negative sense. But it sounds very much like FEMSA are coming down and saying, Yep, I’m going to make you do X, which it sounds like shut down. And I’m curious. Yeah. Is that rule been effective in achieving the intent and do you think it’s been interpreted and handled the right way?
Russel Treat
I just thought about here’s what I’m going to say. And then I’m thinking, well, here’s what’s going to be heard about what I was thinking. Then there’s what’s going to happen when they hear what they think I said. So, look, let me let me put it this way. Yeah, I’m going to frame it a different way. What is the public expectation if there’s a rupture in my backyard?
Rhett Dotson
I think it’s that it’s mitigated, as I’m going to say, as quickly as practically possible
Russel Treat
Give me how long do you think it should take if you have a rupture in your backyard?
Christopher De Leon
Minutes
Rhett Dotson
You know, I mean, at the minute. Okay. Let’s say it’s definitely not an hour. I agree with you. But then so you look, I’d say I mean, you’re both just making an argument for the ASV ROV rule. Right. They are I mean, I don’t we didn’t go there, but I mean that but let’s keep on expectations minutes.
Russel Treat
And then you get into well what’s the practical reality of being able to meet the cut and you know the public expectation what I would say is the rupture is moving in the right direction. It’s causing people to get really clear about what a rupture is. And that clarity is necessary for a level of safety performance. It’s also causing people to get very clear about what’s required in order to identify and isolate a rupture. I want to say one of the thing about this, because my what I what you’re not asking and should be asked, okay, This is this is so fairly simple. If I have SCATA system, if I have high communication rates and good CPM to identify potential leaks quickly and to work through them quickly, getting that done in 30 minutes is reasonable, particularly for the more mature operators. It’s reasonable. There’s work to get there and such, but it’s reasonable. The risk is not there. The risk is when I restart the pipeline. Okay. So that is a whole different conversation because the control room’s job is to get the pipeline shut down and isolated and then you’ve got to explain, you’ve got to follow a process to make sure you don’t restart into a leak. Because if you look at these big incidents, you’re cleaning that front part up is part of it. But the other part of it is you can’t restart into the leak. That’s where all the risk is
Christopher De Leon
So, what you’re getting to is it’s the tether or non-existent tether between integrity management, which is the prevention of full loss and management of consequence on the front end and managing the so what’s that’s what’s that tether between.
Russel Treat
Well, now there’s a third person to that tether because operations have got to be brought into that conversation because they’re the ones that are walking the line or see if they can find any indication of a leak.
Christopher De Leon
How is that happening? Is that changing?
Russel Treat
Well, I don’t I don’t I mean, that’s been the practice forever. It’s just that that’s costly and it takes them out of production then and you know it can be difficult to do and it’s not perfect. Right. Because depending on the rupture and where it’s located, you might not get an immediate indication, particularly if you shut the line down. You don’t know where it is pumping a fluid out. Yeah. So, you know, it’s a challenging problem. The challenging problem. Yeah.
Christopher De Leon
As an example of that tether. Right. And we saw that with Centerville right. Where the integrity, you know, you said, hey, you know, there’s a there’s a dent call in the ILI report, check it out. And they found a leak, that tether is becoming clearer.
Russel Treat
I think that’s where we’re headed is is going to be that if we get a leak alarm and shut down then what’s the appropriate rigor before restart.
Rhett Dotson
And I was curious where we’re moving there to make improvement because you’re right, there was that was related directly to a Marshall and I remember there were there were multiple 911 calls and it was eventually a consumers employee who found the issue. And so, I was thinking in my mind like, well, I remember they had to escalate. They didn’t want to walk the full line in that particular instance So things must have changed since Marshall Now,
Russel Treat
If look at Marshall and amplify the one on Southern California, both of those were underwater. Marshall in a swamp Yeah, and you know, the Huntington Beach one offshore. So, you know, you can’t walk that one. Yeah. You know, the one offering to the beach was at night. So how do you find how do you find an indication at night? Right? So, these things are not simple. You know the rupture, the identifying, the potential defects, you know, find the features require requiring evaluation of the defects and all that. That’s one part. Shutting the line down if you think you may have a lot leaks is another part of the risk we have in the industry. And I think our response is fairly immature. The question is how do I restart with certainty? I’m not restarting into a leak.
Rhett Dotson
I don’t have an answer for the question, but I will say I will say I want to touch on one more point. You mentioned adequate information that I thought you going to go a different direction. Chris, you asked that question, for me, that’s data integration that we deal with and it feels like data integration is never complete. It feels like it’s almost never adequate because you always feel like, I could integrate this information, like integrate this information. Like when you think about geohazards, which is an emerging threat for us. Well, if I would have integrated the rainfall, if I had integrated the fact that this operator had an issue and historically, if I talked to the field guys and I had integrated the fact that we had done regrading of the right away here, it feels like you could go back endlessly in terms of data integration. And I’m curious do you face the same problem?
Russel Treat
Well, you do. You absolutely do. Because, you know, there’s like, well, I want to know that there’s work going on right away.
Rhett Dotson
So how many screens do you put up in front of them? Do you put up like 30 screens and you can’t focus on 30 screens?
Russel Treat
Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s high-performance HMI. What do you put on the screens? How do you arrange the screens, how do you navigate through all the data?
Christopher De Leon
So, I wanted to draw parallels to what we do right on Pipeline Things which is ILI. So. I will try to frame it this way, in ILI and over the last 30 years we’ve seen improvement in sensor technology, right? Mechatronics, right? Yeah. And sensors. And then now it’s moving towards how to use machine learning to avoid some human error. Right. I can I mean; I see so many parallels with you guys controlling it. So, on your side where are we seeing a lot of the innovation? Is it a data acquisition system, Is it an algorithm? Is it in the.
Russel Treat
Well, Yeah. So that the man Yeah, great question we’re kind of boy I could spend 30 minutes just talking about that We’ve been I’ve done a couple of projects on control room of the future and what does that look like? And you know, it would take a while to unpack all that. But what I would say is there’s a lot of learning done. There’s a company out there called Cruxel CM. They’re doing kind of robotic control, kind of autopilot for pipeline operations, and it’s designed to take highly cognitive, you know, high cognitive load. You got to think hard to do it right for you, Texans y’all gotta think hard to do it anyway. High cognitive load type tasks like starting up a long transmission pipeline. You know, I got to sequence the pumps the right way. I got to understand the density of the fluid. I got to make sure that I keep everything’s with within pressure balance. Well, I automate all that. Just set one button and now what do I take? What do I ask? The control to do if they don’t have to spend all that time doing that start? And where does that attention go? Right. And then the other thing is, I think there’s probably an equivalent opportunity because most of the alarm leak, particularly in leak alarming off of CPMs of your false alarm rate, meaning maybe it’s not a leak, but it’s a legitimate hydraulic condition, not a false alarm, like I shouldn’t get that alarm at all, but I have a hydraulic condition. But it’s not a leak. There’s probably an opportunity to apply automation and artificial intelligence to that in order to quickly rule out hydraulic conditions, which anything we do like that so that I can take my alarm count goes from ten a month to two a month, and that’s a big deal.
Christopher De Leon
What goes to my mind is that’s where like things like instead of neural networks that you can use supervised machine learning, right, where there’s still a human component where the.
Russel Treat
Well yeah, exactly. What I would say is ultimately what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to get the human being working on the problem that’s uniquely suited to the human being. Right? So where are the, you know, for this integrity engineer within their scope of control, where are the 3 to 7 most significant features requiring investigation? Right. And then, you know, the same thing in the control room. Where are these alarms that really need to be looked at and looked at quickly? Right.
Rhett Dotson
So, I think I have really enjoyed this episode. It’s been a lot of fun. Even if the pipeline podcast semi hijacked it, it was a welcomed hijack. Russell, I really want to thank you for coming on and joining us. You I’m hoping I’m certain this won’t be the last time that we intersect on a podcast again and one thank you for supplementing you know, our knowledge on the control room side for sure. So, you have one last question statement you’d like to make.
Russel Treat
I just want to shout out to you guys. Look, I think what you do with Pipeline Things is great. You guys have kind of raised the bar as to production level because I’m. yeah, purely audio like you guys are doing all this fancy video stuff. But no, look, I think what you’re doing is great. I love having these kinds of conversations. I think that one of the things we can do as a community, not just us, but as a community in the pipeline world, is how do we get people to kind of cross collaborate? Because, you know, when we have an incident, it’s not a single, single sit. It’s not integrity that failed. It’s not control room that failed. It’s not operations as failed. It’s the entire system that failed. And how do we collaborate more effectively at that level?
Christopher De Leon
We’re leading by example today.
Russel Treat
Well, we’re certainly asking questions and kind of noodling on what the challenges are. I don’t know that we came up with a solution,
Christopher De Leon
No, but it starts collaboration, it’s not our podcast or your podcast, it’s mingling.
Rhett Dotson
So on that note, I want to say, you know, again, thanks for joining us. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Pipeline Things and we look forward to seeing you again in two weeks.I’m your host, Rhett Dotson, with my co-host Christopher De Leon, and our guest, Mr. Russell Treat. Thank you very much.