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In this episode, Elizabeth Corner speaks to Matt Romney, Product Line Director for Pipeline Integrity, T.D. Williamson, about TDW’s perspective on the benefits of working with pipeline membership organisations.
This episode of the podcast covers:
- The value of membership associations for TDW.
- Examples of association impact.
- TDW’s approach to joint industry projects.
- Emerging industry challenges, and how associations can and do help.
- Exciting new technology and deepening collaboration with operators.
- And more!
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Sponsoring this episode of the World Pipelines Podcast is the TDW SmartPlug® Isolation System — The safest inline isolation system on the market. Learn more here.
Sponsoring this episode of the World Pipelines Podcast is the TDW SmartPlug® Isolation System — The safest inline isolation system on the market. Learn more here.
Creators and Guests
What is World Pipelines Podcast?
The World Pipelines podcast, with Elizabeth Corner, is a podcast that connects and unites pipeline professionals to learn about issues affecting the midstream oil and gas industry.
Hello, and welcome back to the World Pipelines podcast, a podcast series for pipeliners featuring short, insightful interviews with people in the oil and gas industry. I'm your host, Elizabeth Corner. And in this season of the podcast, we are talking about membership associations for the pipeline sector. Throughout the series, we're exploring exactly what these associations do to move the midstream sector forwards and to support pipeliners all over the world.
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Elizabeth Corner:In this episode, I am very pleased to welcome Matt Romney, who is pipeline integrity product line director at TD Williamson, our sponsor for this season of the podcast. We happen to be catching up at the pipeline technology conference, the PTC in Berlin. So thank you, Matt. I really appreciate you taking your time out of the conference and the exhibition to chat to me, so welcome.
Matt Romney:Well, thank you. Appreciate that.
Elizabeth Corner:Tealie Willinson, a well established leader in pipeline integrity and maintenance. Let's start off by talking about how does the company engage with industry membership organisations? And perhaps you can tell us what made sponsoring this season of the podcast of interest to you.
Matt Romney:Oh, absolutely. Yeah, so one of the things that's important to TDW is focusing on how do we help operators keep the product in the pipeline safely and effectively. As we understood that this was going to be a focus of the podcast in this season, we really wanted to join and talk about that. Know, we believe that the industry, especially membership organizations, play a vital role in helping operators, in our case ILI vendors and contractors throughout the industry come together and have meaningful conversations around the threats and the challenges that we all see each day. And we find that as we actively participate in these organisations, we get the most out of it and so does the industry.
Elizabeth Corner:That leads me onto my next question. I wonder what value you place on the membership organisations and what kind of value they bring to you in terms of things like innovation, collaboration, even things like industry standards?
Matt Romney:Oh, excellent question. So yeah, there are a number of different membership organizations. There are certainly organizations that focus on research and we find that those organizations do a phenomenal job of identifying potential new technologies, doing early testing. There are organizations that certainly focus on the industry standards and we find that as we participate and engage with the operators and then with those organizations, we're able again to have that meaningful conversation, to find ways to work together to ultimately maintain the integrity of pipelines.
Elizabeth Corner:Fantastic. You're all working towards the same end
Matt Romney:goal. Absolutely.
Elizabeth Corner:And maybe you can share with us some specific examples of how TDW has benefited from working with associations and maybe name a few that you do work with.
Matt Romney:Yeah, yeah. So we work quite a bit with PRCI. There's been a number of projects that they've done over the years. I'll name a couple that have been more recent. So one of the challenges that the industry is certainly facing is around selective seam weld corrosion and PRCI facilitated a project in which they were able to identify different aspects of it.
Matt Romney:So that's the first project or first document that I was aware of that actually documented what a grooving ratio was for selective seam weld corrosion. The grooving ratio being the aspect of the selective seam weld depth versus the corrosion depth elsewhere. I think it's going to be an important metric and it's going to allow us to have more meaningful conversations around more threatening selective seam weld corrosion and really classifying them into different threat levels. Another meaningful project would be around hard spots. Again, PRCI has a active project.
Matt Romney:It's actually been renewed for a couple different iterations. In that they initially started looking at this history of hard spots and looking at the data and what the data is told. Later they kicked off a project and really pulled in ILI, what are the capabilities of ILI tools for assessing hard spots? Now they're looking at NDE, what are the NDE and ditch techniques for assessing hard spots? So this collaboration, this group of projects ultimately is really going to define hard spots and help the industry to work together.
Elizabeth Corner:Great. I love that focus on a real technical focus that you can draw out with your work. And does TDW contribute to research or best practice or knowledge sharing within those organisations?
Matt Romney:Absolutely. Yeah, I would say in general, there's two ways that we'll collaborate or contribute. Certainly on the research side, whether there's a joint industry project or something like that, we'll provide support as far as funding or even sometimes an ILI tool to support that initiative. Outside of that, certainly technical expertise, so thought leadership. We have a number of members or different committees that are working on collaboration and standards like that.
Elizabeth Corner:And when we talk about safety, how does TDW work with membership groups when we're thinking about advancing safety and efficiency?
Matt Romney:Yeah, so safety is always important and one of the things, one of the benefits that I see at least in the pipeline industry is that there really is a lot of collaboration and thought, know, the leadership, thought leadership, the sharing of information across organizations, you know, so it's not uncommon for, for me or, or even my competitors to be working shoulder and shoulder on talking about how do we do this better? How do we help operators and operators sharing information with us? Here's what our concerns are. Here's what is my challenge today. Though that forum that these industry organizations kind of sponsor provides that landscape to have those meaningful conversations.
Elizabeth Corner:Yeah. Many organisations focus on mentorship and developing a workforce and looking after the personnel. Does TDW engage with those sorts of efforts to help attract and train people? We know that's a challenge in the industry. Is there anything you can tell me about that?
Matt Romney:Yeah. Yeah. There there are. We were an early adopter of something called the engineering development program. We don't have that program in the same strength we did originally, but it was a mentorship program internal to TDW, which we bring young engineers in and help them experience, provide them an experience in different parts of the organization.
Matt Romney:Some of those are early EDP engineers are leaders in the organization today. So YPP is an important organization. We have an employee who's actually what grew up and did a lot of work with the YPP organization. Now he's still working with them but more in a leadership role. I think he's on their leadership council for YPP USA now.
Elizabeth Corner:Great, who's that?
Matt Romney:Jonathan Hart.
Elizabeth Corner:Jonathan, great. Yeah, I've spoken to them for this podcast, they are doing some great work. So let's move on to my next question. How does TDW stay ahead of emerging challenges and technologies in the industry? We're here at PTC, so you must have been having some interesting conversations this week.
Elizabeth Corner:Do membership organizations play a role in that process?
Matt Romney:Absolutely they do. So it can be challenging, There's always that new and emerging challenge. Certainly the industry organizations, they play a role as far as just facilitating that conversation. The research organizations sometimes they'll do some early research and identify, Hey, these are technologies that look promising. Typically we'll work within those organizations to grow an idea, at which point then we'll take it in house and do a lot of testing, a lot of working on implementing and then typically we'll work more hand in hand with a specific operator to mature that idea.
Matt Romney:Now we've got something that appears to add value, how do we mature it, how do we make it better?
Elizabeth Corner:Right, so then you take it in house and then you run with it from there.
Matt Romney:You run with it from there. Yeah.
Elizabeth Corner:And what in your view are some of the biggest challenges facing the midstream sector today? How is TDW addressing those?
Matt Romney:Yeah, so for a while what we've been seeing is that the threats that face pipeline operators are becoming more complex. We typically will call them the interacting threats. It's typically multiple threats that are coincident on the same pipe, black space that maybe because the two of them are coincident is actually a greater threat. So a dent with metal loss. Today we see a lot of operators that are facing challenges around circumferential stress corrosion cracking.
Matt Romney:So this is popping up quite a bit. Selective seam corrosion. We talked a little bit earlier about that, but that aggressive corrosion of the long seam. So those are very complex threats that require quite a bit of expertise and research and we leverage our MDS Pro tool, we've got a number of offerings where we've developed specifications where we've worked hand in hand with the industry and then with specific operators to mature those ideas and then ultimately deliver a specification that outlines our performance.
Elizabeth Corner:And how do you see the role of industry associations evolving? So you partner with them, how do you imagine that you're going to continue engaging with them?
Matt Romney:It's going to be engagement, that's just it. I think we will continue to see that the threats will become more complex. The industry organizations play a critical role in helping identify those threats by asking the hard questions, right? And so I think that's the role that they'll continue to play is really facilitate the conversation, ask the hard question and drive the industry to find solutions for them.
Elizabeth Corner:Yeah. And to finish off, I want to talk about what's next for TDW in terms of upcoming initiatives, technologies, you know, what are the conversations that you're having this week, for example, that get you excited about the future?
Matt Romney:Great. I appreciate the question. Yeah. So we're, we're actually in the process, at least on the pipeline integrity side, we're in the process of rolling out something we call ultra res MFL. So we've had our MDS Pro, advanced ILI technology for quite some time.
Matt Romney:It's time to make an update. And so we we've made an update. We've nearly doubled the number of MFL sensors on that tool.
Elizabeth Corner:Great.
Matt Romney:And so that's being rolled out now and we're really excited, we've had a number of opportunities with operators. From there, we're going to have new and exciting data, more resolution, clearer picture of what's going on in the pipeline. It'll be wonderful to then use that to enhance our offerings, really look at the mechanical damage, the circumferential stress, corrosion cracking, hard spots like the seam weld, all of those very complex features and look at how that increased sensor resolution adds to the value we can deliver to operators.
Elizabeth Corner:Great. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. We appreciate your sponsorship and we appreciate your continued support. Thank you.
Matt Romney:Appreciate the time. Thanks a lot. Thanks.
Elizabeth Corner:My thanks to Matt Romney at TDW for giving us a technology provider's perspective on the benefits of working with membership organizations to advance understanding and research and to support safety and efficiency. Thanks for listening to the World Pipelines podcast. Subscribe for free wherever you get your podcasts. If you have enjoyed this episode, please rate and review and forward to a colleague or friends.
Advert:The World Pipelines podcast is brought to you by TD Williamson. The smart plug inline isolation system from TD Williamson delivers with double independent energized seals. Ready to upgrade your next project? Visit tdw.redsmartplug to learn more.