Beyond compliance: the digitisation opportunities of Mega Rule

The Gas Mega Rule aims to improve pipeline safety and reduce the frequency of natural gas pipeline failures. This new regulation will require far more frequent and more intense integrity management than many operators have ever experienced.

The US has more pipelines than the rest of the world combined. In Texas alone, there are more pipelines than all of Europe. Many of these pipelines travel through medium and high consequence areas, near things like schools and densely populated areas. On top of this, pipeline operators are preparing for an energy transition which will see exist-ing infrastructure converted to carry hydrogen, which behaves very differently to tradition oil and gas, LNG, mining slurry and water.

Naturally, with this added pressure, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) has implemented the Mega Rule as a means to improve the safety of North America’s pipelines. This regulation calls for far greater intensity in terms of pipeline safety, inspection, and reporting, as Penspen detailed in its recent white paper. Many pipeline owners who previously have not fallen under regulatory requirements will need to comply with Mega Rule’s integrity management standards by as soon as 2035.

What this means in real terms is thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of kilometres of pipelines in North America will now need more frequent and more rigorous inspections. This will cost pipeline operators millions of dollars every year and will inevitably cause downtime on their networks, especially as they get used to this new intensity of requirement.

Integrity engineers are no doubt anxious about the workload that will come with Mega Rule’s new regulatory requirements, it may even feel like an impossible task. That’s because they understand the complexity of pipeline integrity management.

The reality of the task ahead

Inspecting a pipeline is a matter of processing measurement data and making judgements and recommendations on the management of the pipeline. While simple in theory, the reality of this task is more challenging.

Firstly, there is the sheer quantity of data that needs to be collected and processed. Right now, the inspection data required for routine pipeline inspections would be close to maxing out the market-leading spreadsheet software, both in terms of size and the programme’s processing power. But spreadsheets are, at present, the standard tool for integrity inspections.

This approach is slow and unwieldy, and the problem is only intensifying as technology improves; as inspection techniques become more sophisticated, the amount of data produced grows exponentially.

Secondly, there is no one source of data when it comes to pipeline inspections. The inspection data comes in different forms, from different software platforms, in different file types, and even from different suppliers. This means that integrity engineers are often spending more time crunching through data and manually trying to align disparate sets when they should be focussing on the actual insightful engineering they specialise in.

Finally, there is the issue of accuracy, or rather, a shortfall of accuracy. Data processing of the scale required for pipeline integrity management is naturally prone to human error, from the input stage right the way through to the final assessment. The work is simply too big for a human to do 100% precision and accuracy. But the stakes are high, and the consequences of such mistakes could potentially be devastating.

The prospect of drastically increasing the number of integrity inspections required on a pipeline is therefore understandably daunting. But, at Penspen, our view is that Mega Rule is the necessity that breeds innovation. This could well be the opportunity and impetus pipeline operators need to change how integrity management is done.

Digitising the process

Digitising the pipeline inspection process, through software platforms like Penspen’s THEIA, will not only ensure regulatory compliance by consolidating historical reports, but also offers myriad opportunities to optimise operations.

THEIA brings pipeline integrity data together, processes it, and presents it visually, overlaid on asset maps, making the data easier to conceptualise at a human level. It, and programmes like it, can consolidate and analyse all pipeline integrity data, past and present, from all suppliers, and deliver inspection reports to known standards within minutes, something that would take weeks using a spreadsheet. It is completely plat-form-agnostic, eliminating the need for data wrangling and, with the oversight of an experienced integrity engineer, it drastically improves the accuracy of integrity management reporting.

THEIA itself is also a proven and well-evidenced solution, that is backed by 70 years of expertise.

Case studies

Peru

For example, Penspen recently ran an ILI study for a natural gas company in Peru operating around 1500 km of natural gas and natural gas liquid pipelines, compressor plants and pumping stations in complex Peruvian geography.

We used THEIA to consolidate 58 ILI runs executed in previous years, using different technologies on different pipeline segments hosted in the client’s system.

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