Streamline pipeline integrity documentation management to reduce costs, mitigate risks, and accelerate compliance

Business challenges

The integrity of gas transmission pipelines must achieve compliance with the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s (PHMSA) new Gas Gathering Rule. New and expanded requirements mandate that maximum allowable operating pressure (MAOP) be confirmed or tested using specific types of data and processes for compliance. Further, over 425,000 miles of previously grandfathered pipeline now require confirmation.

All pipeline documentation must be traceable, verifiable, and complete (TVC). Achieving PHMSA compliance within these new requirements creates multiple challenges for pipeline and safety engineers, asset integrity supervisors, inspection and testing crews, quality control personnel, and Department of Transportation (DOT) compliance managers. For example:

• Pipeline documentation for grandfathered pipelines is unknown or nonexistent
• Pipeline documentation is in multiple distributed repositories, with different management processes and systems
• Pipeline documentation is not organized, obscuring what is related and relevant
• Multiple data types exist, comprised of physical and digital formats and including unstructured handwritten notes
• Relevant records and their most recent versions are difficult to find and validate as TVC

Impact

After processing incident reports and receiving input from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and industry stakeholders, the PHMSA recognized that incomplete and inaccurate pipeline information was at the root of failed pipeline integrity programs. As a result, energy organizations face multiple negative consequences such as compliance difficulties and delays, escalating costs, and increased legal, financial, and safety risks.

To overcome these challenges, energy organizations need to unlock access to the right information and documentation—often trapped in diverse and widely distributed physical formats. Manual content searches must be replaced with intelligent, automated document processing capabilities that streamline TVC document management.

What if you could

Quickly access critical and historical pipeline documentation to gain visibility into data to efficiently and accurately achieve pipeline integrity compliance.

Overcome pipeline documentation and compliance challenges by digitizing records into data you can use, automate, and validate to:

• Thoroughly search, correlate, and leverage available records to avoid costly resolutions
• Unlock access to critical geoscientific data, often captured in broadly dispersed paper formats
• Uncover data connections to classify and consolidate data for ready availability and searchability regardless of data type or format
• Ensure pipeline records are traceable, verifiable, and complete
• Reduce manual errors and facilitate data sharing across departments and functions
• Safeguard pipeline record storage, whether existing or from new tests, for the life of the asset
• Accelerate compliance to better manage costs and reduce risks
• Limit the scope of testing or rebuilding pipelines to control costs