Yemisi Izuora
GE and Accenture have unveiled an Intelligent Pipeline Solution, to help natural-gas utilities and other operators monitor their pipelines in real-time.
“Pipeline operators run a risk assessment once a year,” said Accenture’s Jeff Miers, midstream lead at the company’s North America resources division.
“With Intelligent Pipeline Solution, they can access risk analytics every day.”
There are more than 2 million miles of pipeline around the world, a lot of it aging.
More than half of America’s pipes were laid before 1970, which means they are approaching their life expectancy.
According to federal statistics, there were more than 5,000 significant pipeline incidents resulting in 360 fatalities and 1,365 injuries nationwide between 1995 and 2014.
With Intelligent Pipeline Solution, pipeline operators can monitor their entire system in near real-time and make decisions based on current information.
Instead of repairing leaks discovered on a Google heat map, Peoples Gas would have been able to notice the weak integrity of its pipes before they started leaking and acted on that information in a more timely manner.
To detect potential safety concerns, pipeline operators use a process called “smart pigging,” which utilizes an electronic gadget that is run through the pipes driven by the pressure of the material native to the pipeline (gas or liquid) and which detects corrosion, dents, and other problems in the pipes.
“They hire special companies to do that for them,” Damon Hill, a public affairs specialist with PHMSA, said. “The pipeline operators don’t do it themselves. It can take a month or longer to extract the data and read it.”
Intelligent Pipeline Solution integrates data from a number of areas including the National Oceanic Atmospheric Association and the U.S. Geological Survey. Other data sources include inline inspections, pipeline attributes, risk scores, planned assessments, leak histories, emergency valve locations, and precipitation and fault lines.
The cloud-based software features a smart dashboard for enterprise-level management, predictive risk monitoring tools, automated event alerts, and a geospatial visualization tool. Using the system, pipeline managers can detect all the same safety-related abnormalities detected by pigging, get a better handle on weather affecting their pipelines, and gain better situational awareness through one app rather than access all that information from multiple sources.
Columbia Pipeline Group in Houston, Texas has signed on as Intelligent Pipeline Solution’s first customer. A spokesman for the company said his company was pleased with how the product is developing thus far.
CPG is located within the Marcellus and Utica shale areas and operates 15,000 miles of interstate natural gas pipelines.