Empower your business with pipeline integrity data for Communications & Media

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okay our next speaker this afternoon is michelle stratt account manager with ingu in canada michelle has been working in the oil and gas industry for over 14 years in sales and business development with companies such as slumberjay a claro softworks and seitel canada before joining ngo solutions michelle welcome to the virtual pipeline summit and over to you to talk us through piper's inline inspection as a service the operating system for pipeline integrity good morning danny thanks so much and welcome from canada um it's a pleasure to to be here today and welcome everyone i want to thank you for joining me to learn about ingu and our inline inspection as a service so my name as you mentioned is michelle stratt and i am an account manager at ingu solutions located in calgary canada that looks like we have a clicking problem here okay we started in google about five years ago to address the problem that over 40 percent of the world's pipelines cannot be inspected with existing inline inspection methods these are typically smaller diameter pipelines gathering pipelines or pipelines with sharp bends so what we've done to solve this problem is we developed our own miniature inspection tool called pipers however our core business is actually data analytics and i'll get into that a bit more shortly our head office is located in calgary alberta canada and we also have an office in houston texas and as you can see from this map most of our deployments have been in north america however we have expanded into places such as brazil australia ireland uh nigeria singapore and the uk and these are just to mention a few so what is it we do ingu is actually the first in the industry to offer a self-service inspection model that eliminates significant engineering and downtime costs so you can regularly assess your pipeline's well condition as well as keep on top of deposits and leaks while keeping your operations going so we developed miniature multi-sensor pipers that freely flow within operating pipelines regardless of location condition material configuration and they actually fit in the palm of your hand so i'm probably one of the only presenters today that can actually show you the tool as i'm doing the presentation so this is this is our exact piper tool that will go in your pipeline we offer two different types of deployments free floating in a liquid in liquid lines and also attached to cleaning pigs and gas lines so with our free floating deployment we prepare our pipers so they are neutrally buoyant and this allows them to flow naturally within the liquid of the pipeline and this ensures that pipers go wherever the liquid goes even if they're sharp bends or risers the operator simply opens the valve drops the piper in the line closes the valve turns on the flow and it's as simple as that now however if you run cleaning pins in your lines regular on a regular basis attaching pipers to a cleaning pig is a really convenient way to inspect your lines while you're cleaning them so having the option of the two different deployments works well for a number of companies as some have both gas and liquid lines or multi-phase lines so we do run two pipers for every inspection to ensure that they have the most accurate data this also gives us a second data set so we can do a comparison so if we see something at the same time we know it's an operational event however if we see something at the same distance then it's most likely an anomaly in the line that you might want to investigate further so our self-service inspection process allows you to have full control by deploying your pipers by your own field operator so there's no downtime and no need for hard for large heavy equipment or third-party consultants so this actually reduces the cost of inline inspection by a factor of 10 making it possible to inspect multiple assets much more frequently in a single run we provide highly efficient surveys which include leak detection and this identifies and localizes leaks a pressure survey which measures the pressure profile over the length of the pipeline deposit survey where we locate deposits diameter changes and even possible collapsed liners and of course magnetic survey which gives you an overall wall condition of your pipeline and we can also detect fittings wells areas with severe corrosion or metal loss greater than 25 percent each piper is also equipped with five sensors a magnetometer and this screen's volumetric wall loss in particular when used on a regular basis an accelerometer measuring the linear acceleration a gyroscope which helps indicate orientation an acoustic sensor for our leak detection and a pressure sensor measuring the pressure profile indicating changes in diameter and pipeline conditions our datasets library is very impressive and includes a complete range of inspection histories such as materials conditions and geographies that offer unprecedented contextual analysis and continuous advancement of our data analytics capabilities we've deployed our pipers in various types of pipelines uh and and in pipelines as small as two inches in diameter so we can inspect not only steel lines but also flex steel hdpe fiber spar and ductile iron so not only can we inspect steel lines but we can also we're also able to locate flanges and joints even in non-steel lines we can also be deployed in various types of fluids such as crude oil emulsion gas produce water fresh water and wastewater and a number of our clients have annual subscriptions in place which actually reduce their annual spend even further when you're dealing with an incident or using pipers to support your current integrity program pipers can actually be ready to be deployed at a moment's notice so by simply having your pipers on site you can inspect your lines without long lead times which optimizes decision making and actions while reducing your costs so simply drop a piper in your line whenever you want without any issues so we do ship the pipers directly to the field and they can deploy it when it's convenient for them so if they have a scheduled run on monday and for whatever reason the operator is not able to make it uh they can deploy it wednesday friday the following week that's the beauty of this is there's no rescheduling service crews or equipment or tools they just deploy it when need be you let us know and then and then we're ready to receive the data so we can do the analysis so when we ship them to your field operator we also provide instruction video that explains how to activate our pipers which is simply taking a magnet and touching a certain spot on the piper it lights up and that means it's activated and ready to go uh and i'll explain a little more about the the uh specifics of the pipers in just a minute so when a run is completed there's two ways to get the data back to ingu you can ship the pipers back to us so we can upload the data and do the analysis or we can provide a cable with the pipers and then we would just show you how to basically plug it in like a usb upload it and ftp it to us so that we can begin the analysis right away without any delays another thing you might find interesting is that we do not charge for our pipers at all so we don't sell them or rent them our business really does revolve around the data analytics so each piper is used only once to ensure that we have the highest quality data with every run here's a quick snapshot of our piper's safety and performance so pipers are csa certified and rated intrinsically safe and suitable for use in class one zone zero environments in three and three inch pipelines and larger pipers can be run in pressures of up to ten thousand kpa or 1400 psi and this has a run time of 24 hours in two inch pipelines pipers can run in pressures up to 3000 kpa or 435 psi with a run time of two hours and pipers can run in temperatures from -20 degrees celsius to 60 degrees celsius or four minus four degrees fahrenheit to 140 degrees fahrenheit the data rate we're measuring with our magnetometer is 400 measurements per second and our pressure sensor is at 100 measurements per second so we can identify and localize welds and fittings along with hydrostatic pressure measurements and velocity profiles and as mentioned earlier we can assess the wall condition of your pipeline along with corrosion deposits and leaks so our accessibility or our accessible technology has given us the opportunity to work with a complete range of clients around the globe be it large or small private or public as well as we're working very closely with our agents such as pica in north america hydrocarbon support concept in nigeria nw water services in ireland and working group in south america and in addition to these companies that you see on their screen which we're very grateful to give us permission to share to share their logos we're also currently working with shell exxon mobile and hotel so as far as some customer applications i've got a few slides to share with you that just give a bit of example of of what the data looks like when we provide it in a report so ingu can provide you with the ability to monitor multiple high-risk lines for leaks on a regular basis simply by having pipers readily available on-site the benefit of running free-floating pipers in a liquid environment is there is literally no or virtually no background noise so that makes it much easier to listen for leaks the graph on the right is a spectrogram of audio recorded around the location of a leak signature in one of the lines that we screened we perform deposit surveys with our free floating deployment as well and as i mentioned with our leak detection when running pipers in a liquid environment there's little background noise and also the piper is not hindered by friction so if there is a deposit in the line we can tell you where the deposit is and that means you can do more efficient cleaning a typical application would be to run the piper's pre and post cleaning and then we can tell you the overall effectiveness of the cleaning as well as the location of where the cleaning was effective and where it was not so in this example we ran our pipers attached to a cleaning pig in the same pipeline in 2018 2019 and 2020. so i want to really uh reiterate how repeatable our data is so as you can see from this example the magnetic flux is virtually the same in all three runs so unless there's been a change in in your pipeline we should see very similar data for every run and this is how we're a bit different from from a lot of the other tools out there so our data is very repeatable so when we do have a baseline run we can overlay the data from subsequent runs over the baseline to see if there are any changes in the line and so while performing regular monitoring you have greater program control early detection which results in lower costs so an example of this is how repeatable our data was for a project we did with petrobras this is in the past summer this past summer they wanted to test our technology to see if we can identify and localize an illegal hot tap so what we did is we ran our pipers in the line to get a to get a baseline then they created a hot tap but did not tell us where it was as you can see in the date example the first run without the hot tap is blue and after the hot tap is orange not only could we identify the hot tap in the green highlighted area but we identified at the exact location having the ability to keep pipers on site and run them weekly or monthly allows you to be proactive instead of reactive when it comes to potential production loss from illegal hot taps this is a run we did for a client last year where we identified corrosion in a section of the pipeline in the graph on the right the magnetic flux is shown in blue and its typical spread is ident is indicated by the green band locations with outlier magnetic flux are marked in orange and the identified joint locations are indicated by vertical gray lines that you see in the background in this case we identified the outliers in our report and our client did a verification date based on our analysis they ended up replacing this section of the line due to corrosion this is an example of a a verification take that one of our clients did last year based on another one of our magnetic survey analysis so besides identifying fittings and welds we can also detect metallic features so we can actually determine the difference between a good weld and a bad weld and that's the example you see here and in this plot there are two crossings where the pipeline goes deeper and then comes up again and then where it goes below a river crossing and then back up again so it basically is just a quick snapshot of what a geometric survey looks like when we provide them in our final report and including this map we would also provide you with a list of the bends and the bend angles in your line so if you don't have any history on your pipeline if you've acquired a new asset and it didn't come with much information this is a great way for you to not only get an assessment of the of the pipeline wall condition but also where the line goes from start to finish and finally uh i wanted to do or give a big shout out to chevron and thank them very much for their continued support over the past three years so chevron not only selected us as part of an initiative designed to advance innovative technology within the oil and gas industry in 2017 they put us to the test in a series of lab and field trials in 2018 and then directly inves in invested in ingu in 2019 and accelerated our market uh development so in 2020 chevron's been deploying ingu technology across its business units so if you haven't already seen the great video that chevron made of our pipers please visit our virtual booth so i'm finally wrapping up my presentation today and i want to thank you all again for taking the time and please feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions or if there are any pipelines that you'd like to further investigate using our technology great thank you for that michelle well done for picking up the laptop i've got a bit of an echo in my ear here so i'm just trying to figure out what's happening sorry about that oh that's okay so i hope you can uh keep up with with the questions here there are so many questions that came in people are obviously very interested in in these pipers um and hopefully you'll get the questions afterwards to follow up with everyone individually but let's start with az who asks how do you map the data against the pipeline length did you get that one michelle okay i've got a bit of a delay here again so i'll try to think see if i can okay sorry i just got the question now so we we map the data against the pipeline length by by a few different things we've got various sensors that are in our piper so with these sensors they're able to identify the welds in the line so by doing that we can locate where we are in proximity of the line and we also when we know the the full city of the flow we can convert time to distance and if we have an elevation map provided by the client as well uh we can overlay that and be able to determine the distance of the of the anomaly in the line perfect thank you um so hope for everyone that's listening the uh the broadcast is about 30 seconds behind the live stream so that was the reason for the delay on answering the question there hopefully michelle can hear me now it's it's about a 30 second delay right well i'm going to ask about the flow how does the flow affect the data coverage can you repeat that sorry danny yes the the flow in the line how does that affect the data coverage and particularly looking at low flow lines like lng lines so the flow we ask when you do um a free free floating inspection that you keep the velocity at about 0.1 to 2 meters per second so that and and as a continuous flow as possible so this way it provides us the ability to have a more consistent um data coverage so that we can provide you with the best analysis possible so the more consistent the flow the better and if you can keep it within the the 0.1 to 2 meters per second that would be our ideal threshold perfect thanks how about pinholes can uh sorry uh leak detection thresholds um what what's the um the minimum rate uh in like liters per hour that can be detected so we've actually um the leaks that we have been able to detect um it is a bit difficult to measure but i believe the lowest leak we've been able to detect is uh 0.75 liters per minute and that was with a very low pressure line i think it was something like 5 psi so all we ask when when we're doing a pressure or a leak detection survey is that we have some sort of pressure in the line because the lower the pressure the more difficult it would be for the leak to create a sound so normally the leak would almost sound like a whistle so in this case the one where where we did detect it at that at that rate that was a very low pressure so i believe we can go even even smaller than that great thank you one of the questions asked about how the balls are the pipers are retrieved at the end of the line sorry can you repeat again yes boy um how are the pipers retrieved at the end of the lane okay so when we run free floating um there's different ways that we're able to launch and receive our pipers so for free floating um just to give you some examples of what we do we use argus valves vertical pig barrels conventional pig barrels uh flange access excuse me in double valve chamber and this is all for free floating for receiving them we could we'd use things such as conventional pig barrel witch's hat argus valve and basket strainer so wherever you can insert some sort of a mesh or strainer to to stop a two inch ball from going through the pipeline we our operations group actually does work with your team prior to deploying the pipers to ensure that we have the best possible solution available for your specific pipeline because every every pipeline setup is unique so we work with you to determine what would be the best solution in your case perfect thank you can you comment on the the precision on the wall thickness readings and corrosion lost so when we're doing wall thickness we don't actually measure the wall thickness in the line but what we can do is tell you when there is um wall loss of greater than 25 percent so when we're running our pipers in the line we can determine if there is different um uh schedules so a schedule 80 we can tell is different from a schedule 40. we can tell you when diameters have changed in your line but not necessarily at this point in time tell you what your exact wall thickness is just whether or not there has been significant well loss and this could be internal or external so we we can't at this point tell you if it is internal or external only that in this specific area there has been some wall loss perfect thank you i think for sure it has a great application especially as like a screening technology and then you could go into more detail um and you'll you'll get all these questions michelle so hopefully you can respond to them all individually i know there are some people asking for specification sheets as well perfect so thank you for coming back on and thank you you