Baker Hughes & Why It Matters How You Cook It

Rhett Dotson All right. Welcome to this episode of Pipeline Things. As we continue on our PPIM 2024 journey, where we are bringing you, should we say, the best of the best of the vendors. Christipher De Leon I would say, we cover various topics that make people feel like they’ve been here. Rhett Dotson There we go. I am your host, Rhett Dotson, my co-host, Christopher de Leon. And if you're with us, you can see our esteemed guest today, Mohamed Elseify. Did I get that right? Mohamed Elseify Yes. And the Elseify is just to give a background about it. In Arabic, it means the summer man. Christopher De Leon The summer man. Mohamed Elseify And I live in Canada. Christopher de Leon Because you're the light, buddy, or he brings warmth. Rhett Dotson He brings warmth. Absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, we were talking Chris, And Mohamed, you were joining us in about how great of a food town Houston is and seafood and, you know, there are people that, like seafood, don't like seafood. Like I said, my wife is not a big seafood fan, but you hit the nail and you said it. It matters how you cook it. Mohamed Elseify Of course. Rhett Dotson It matters how you prepare it, right? Christopher de Leon Yeah. You can ruin a good steak. You can ruin scallops. Rhett Dotson Absolutely. But you know what I was going to say? You kind of went dark on me there. I had a positive spin on it. You know, we're going to be talking with Mohammed about today is it matters how you cook it. I think what you guys are doing with the technology we're going to talk about it absolutely matters how you cook it for our audience out there. If you've been to PPIM, if you've been IPC any time over the last decade and you haven't seen Mohamed speak, you either skipped out on entire sessions related to bending, strain or geo hazards, or, maybe, you lived in a cave. I'm not sure, but you're pretty well known on that front. I mean, I can think of at least four presentations. I've sat through. Mohamed Elseify Some good? Christopher de Leon Yeah. Rhett Dotson You're good. Yeah. You have met the bar for criteria. Christopher de Leon You're on the show. Mohamed Elseify Okay. I'm flattered. Rhett Dotson Yes. So, yeah. So, Mohamed if you don't mind, tell us a bit about yourself. Who are you? And this is what we like to ask? Well, in this series. Where did you come from? But how did you find yourself into pipelines? Christopher de Leon Did you go to pipelines, or did pipelines just kind of throw itself in your life? Mohamed Elseify Actually, pipeline threw itself? Yeah. basically, I was working, in offshore oil and gas rigs. I was designing them. I was working on, basically the architecture of them, you know, especially in the ice manifested areas. So upstream, upstream, upstream, you know what I mean? And then I don't know what happened. But in 2013, probably, I started to see there was a decline and I, I was like, I didn't want to say I wanted to jump the ship because, like, I noticed that there are layoffs coming. So, I said, let's go and try midstream. And I knew nothing. Yeah. Zero. Like I like literally I did not know if it's circular or square or triangular, this pipeline and, I applied to the job and, you know, I was not expecting any response, but I just got the job. Rhett Dotson Yeah. Excellent. So, it's really funny. I didn't know that you had that background. I also grew up in upstream. The first couple of years I thought I wanted to design platforms and then discovered I didn't, but I worked with a lot of floating assets. I never got into any of the fixed ones, but, yeah, you're right. 2013 till about 2015 was a dark time for that. Mohamed Elseify Oh, yeah. Rhett Dotson It got; it got pretty bloody for sure. Mohamed Elseify Especially in ice manifested areas. Nobody's going to go and explore an ice manifested areas when it's going down. So yeah, you know, this is my PhD actually. So that's what got me oil and gas. The whole thing is I; my PhD was about offshore structures in ice manifested areas. Rhett Dotson So that is fantastic. So, you're with Baker Hughes now? How long have you been with Baker? Mohamed Elseify Ten years. Rhett Dotson Ten years? Mohamed Elseify Even ten years. Mohamed Elseify All right. And, what do you do there, Baker? So currently, the, product line manager. So, basically responsible for the strategy behind AXISS, the, standardization, the productization of the tool, the cooking of it, basically. Rhett Dotson So, if the fish doesn't taste good. We come to you. Okay. Be prepared for the audience? If your fish doesn't taste good on access, you come to Mohamed. That's how it works. Mohamed Elseify So, I claim that I know how to cook. That's. But my wife doesn't like my food. Christopher de Leon But, you know, API 1163 is self-governed. ILI vendors are self-governing so just say it's fantastic. Mohamed Elseify Well, yeah, sure, I will follow. Rhett Dotson Yeah. So, you can keep going if you, the audience might catch some of that background. But believe it or not, the directional likes are pretty good about sorting that out. So, for our audience that's not familiar with AXISS, there is a broad spectrum of our audience that will know what AXISS is. But there's a lot out there that don't. Yeah. Give us a little background. What is the AXISS technology Mohamed and how long has it been around? Mohamed Elseify So, the AXISS technology basically is to simplify. It's an ILI axis measurement tool. And this whole technology came out because of JIP if you attended my paper yesterday, formed around 2006 and, and operators came to Baker Hughes and they said bluntly, we want s technical tool, ILI technical tool. And you know the myth around is the major source of axial strain in pipelines is geo technical hazards. It's a myth by the way, because we have seen over the years so many like of course geo hazards is a main contributor. I'm not saying but we have seen a lot of other sources, of axis strain. So anyway, we developed a tool which is an ILI tool to measure axial strain and it went commercial in 2014. So now ten years. Rhett Dotson Ten years, you know, and I'm trying to think it feels like the first time that I saw it was probably 2015. It was before I was at Rosen. Very, very early applications of it. you guys have had a few. Have you guys had a few iterations? Mohamed Elseify Yes. Rhett Dotson Right. So, what's the what would you call the current iteration now? Mohamed Elseify Gen two. Rhett Dotson So, this is Gen two. What's unique about Gen two? Mohamed Elseify It's nothing big. It's just like at the start we used to have only four probes. and then we found that it's better to increase them for eight probes. And remember, it's a geotechnical tool, so we don't need the very nitty gritty, fine resolution. But the problem with the four probes was if you lose two probes, you are done. It's a failed run. So, in order to increase our, first run success rate, we decided to move them to eight. That's one reason. The other reason is, okay, you are running a tool that measures axial strain. Some of the, operators, they really want to know what is the maximum around the circumference at any given section. So, eight points. Yeah. Eight points, you know, is, gives you more accurate. You know, if you do interpolation and, you know, the data science stuff, it gives you a more accurate maximum. Christopher de Leon Yeah. Rhett Dotson For sure. That makes sense. Christopher de Leon For some of us who maybe don't have as much experience with the AXISS, can you give us an elevator pitch on the general measurement principle of how the AXISS tool works? Mohamed Elseify Sure. So, it is an electromagnetic sensor. And, basically, it's based on a, concept called magnets friction. And magnets friction to simplify things because I'm not good in magnetics, personally. But, when you have a federal magnetic material, the pipeline steel. There are magnetic domains in the pipeline steel that basically specify the magnetic characteristics of the, the steel. And, if you apply any mechanical strain or stress to this location, as you can imagine, as like atoms, these magnetic domains keep changing their orientation and, you know, moving around. So, what happens is this change the magnetic characteristic, namely, let's call it the permeability the magnetic permeability. And that's what we measured the change in the magnetic permeability. And our models basically calculate and of course the calibration models and calibration we can get. Christopher de Leon The measurement principle is calibrated to what you're looking for. And in this case axial strain. Mohamed Elseify Yeah. Perfect. Rhett Dotson So, this is a you know might be some of our audience may be familiar or maybe not other. This is a separate tool that goes behind. This isn't something that's built into for instance your caliper technology, so when you're running a combo tool, this isn't just come with a combo tool. This is something else to be added on to the combo tool to request it. Mohamed Elseify Yeah. Look at the here you go. So that's again another difference between generation one and generation two. So, in generation one we used to put the axis on the second vehicle, which has the electronics, the IMU, the caliber. But it didn't work well because you know, as we started growing it started needing more real estate. So, we now have that on a separate module, third module at the back of the MFL tool. And it has to go to the back of like this generation has to go at the back of the MFL for magnetic, reasons. And I don't want to get in details of that. But like simply the permanent magnet of the MFL, it is required to eliminate any magnetic hysteresis in the pipeline steel. Rhett Dotson It makes sense. Mohamed Elseify And, basically it makes it like a white page for us so that our sensor detects the characteristics. Rhett Dotson Yeah, I like it. And you see that with other technologies too, that like to be on the back end of that. So, it makes sense. The what markets is it available? And I mean, can anybody anywhere North America worldwide? Mohamed Elseify Well, it started in North America. Christopher de Leon Started by the JIP as you mentioned. Mohamed Elseify Yes. It started in Canada. The JIP was in Canada, so let's call it Canada. And then it moved a bit to the U.S, but not as much as Canada. Canada has been always good adoption there. Yeah. And then in 2020, we moved we started to globalize it. So currently we have it in Europe, we have it in China, we have it in Asia Pacific. We have we have it almost around the world. Rhett Dotson So, I want to ask you a fun question. So, you've been doing these ten years and obviously you came from upstream. And so upstream, ice rigs. And then they put you in charge of this new AXISS technology to measure membrane strain. What was the moment when you really realized and thought, we have something here, like this works? Where do you remember a moment where you just had, like a run or something? A call that you made a and you were like, this is gold. Mohamed Elseify Yes, yes, yes. And, I don't want to, name the operator but the moment when we found a landslide that I don't know if you remember, there was a paper this morning. It was really slow moving, and IMU couldn't feel you couldn't detect anything. and this was a great moment for us because, like, first of all, the operator was really happy, and, it was a really serious one. Another moment actually, we, and I have a paper about this in 2020. I don't remember my memory is so bad. We did a paper, with a, you know, operator in China, and, we have a problem cracking and if I keep talking about AXISS or. This generation, at least, it's macro features. And we are we, our sales person. They. No, they don't sell it for local. So, when they came to us and said Griswold and Griswold cracking like this is going so local and so away from our spectrum. But anyway, we long story short, we worked with them. We have a very good, you know, susceptibility model. And we came up with a solution to integrate data from IMU, MFL, and axis. And this model really worked very well to the extent that we found four really high-risk cracks when they dug it. And two of them probably were going to lead to leak or failure or whatever. So that's another one actually, me and one of my colleagues used to and we still but nobody believes us. We call this the Holy Grail because, you know, at the end of the day, you are a structural health monitoring engineer. Let's get out of this industry. Just be a structural health monitoring engineer. What is better than having, you know, the stress and strain status that gives you a real picture. Rhett Dotson Absolutely. So, we're going to have to look we're going to have to get that paper. Maybe you can email us that paper. But for this moment we are going to take a quick break and we'll be right back where we pick up with where the future of AXISS is going. BJ Lowe Hello, everyone. It's BJ Lowe from Clarion, and we're very happy to be a sponsoring this season of Pipeline things to showcase the impressive technologies being exhibited. Here at PPIM. Ben Stroman I'm Ben Stroman and we've been impressed with the turnout at the 36th PPIM conference event in 2024 with 159 companies exhibiting over 3000 attendees and over 90 papers being presented. We've had a great year with a huge turnout in terms of high-quality technical paper submissions. Attendees this year will have the opportunity to hear from industry stakeholders and their advancements in several fields, including ILI analysis, geo hazards, material identifications and verification, emerging issues, repair, hydrogen integrity, management, entity and more. If you couldn't make it in person to the PPIM conference in February, you can always find helpful resources and tools offered by Clarion year-round. We have several courses taught by subject matter experts that can be found on our website. We're excited for PPIM this year and we hope to see everyone next year as well. But be sure to stay up to date with Clarion and its offerings by joining our mailing list on our Web site. Thanks. Rhett Dotson All right. Welcome back to Pipeline Things, where we continue our conversation with Mohamed on the subject of AXISS. So, really appreciating when we closed out last, when I asked you when or the moment you realized you had gold on your hands. what I'd like to know now is, and you, you did a really good job for the audience. I want you to know, at this PPIM session, Mohamed presented, a paper on the evolution of AXISS. And so, if you didn't get a chance to look it up, you absolutely should. But over the last ten years, and you covered this, what did you guys what have you all learned with AXISS over the last decade that it's been run. Mohamed Elseify Well so it basically evolved because at the beginning we had a tool. And this tool measures axial strain. And we used to deliver axial strain and that's it. But at a certain point we started to productize it in a way. Number one is we need to ask the operator what is the issue. What do you want to do. Because it's a new technology. And this technology, you know, as any new technology, it takes some time for people understand how to benefit from it. Number one is it is we have used it in detection. And when I say detection, I mean detection. whether hidden geo hazards. So, some operators ran it and they didn't even calibrate. And the reason for that because the relative measurements, even they have the same, the right trend. So, you can point out where are the locations of high axial train and you can see the signatures, how big it is, and you can point out hidden geo hazards. So, detection of new locations of geo hazards. But the takeaway is this is expected right. The takeaway is while doing the detection, as I said, we have done some sort of a study. We found that this you hazard the only cost 25% of the high accidents strain features. So, it's that's why I said it's the myth of the geo hazards. Definitely your geo hazards introduce high access train. But there are other reasons. Number one manufacturing and construction residuals. They are there and there are hidden. Number two, the pipeline characteristics like locations at valves at leaves those locations you have concentrations built in the system and you don't see them, the right of way characteristics going underneath road railway or whatever. So, there are other reasons. And this helped us to open. It's an eye opener for us when we are looking into the data. That's number one. Number two monitoring. So, you have high risk area no matter what is the high-risk area. And you have a technical problem, for example, and you want to monitor the progress of the issue, the progress of the strain. And it worked really good in that sense. And number three, I would like to say that it is measuring or assessing the efficacy of the mitigation methods used. So, you have a problem, you have an area with unstable soil or whatever, and you put a, I don't know, a support or any mitigation method you want to know, did it fix the issue or not? So, you run it after that and you see what's going on. The one that really, basically surprised me is working with susceptible models for some local features. As I mentioned in my previous. Christopher de Leon Are we talking about geo hazards or are you still focusing like the susceptibility models for like construction type screen indications or focusing really just more on geo hazards? Mohamed Elseify No, I'm focusing on local features. Again, the tool is not for local features, but still there are some locations and there are some areas that you can use to feed susceptibility models. And a great example for that, the one that I just mentioned about the cracking because at the end of the day, you know, if you have cracks you don't want to see tension around it. CSCC, you don't want to see high tension or the tension higher than the hoop. So, stuff like that. And it worked well in this direction. Christopher de Leon So, I do have a question. You mentioned something you said monitoring. And so, you know, a lot of times when we look at a complementary technology like IMU, there's often this thought process of, well, we should be able to compare them or how do we compare them, educate us a little bit on the ability to compare one axis run and data set to another to opportunity, look for change, or to serve as a monitoring tool? Is it being it straightforward? Is the accuracy being at a high level? Mohamed Elsiefy It is very straightforward. And if you want to imagine it, it is exactly like the IMU. It's the same exact process even you know in Baker Hughes, we added this to the same software platform that we use for the run-to-run analysis of IMU. And it's very simple. Rhett Dotson I'm curious. You know, one thing I thought is you mentioned that there are other sources of axial strain. Got my wheels turning. And I know that, heated pipelines and aboveground pipelines often have significant just axial loads due to operations. You guys have any experience in running in those settings? Mohamed Elseify Above ground? No, but in high, higher temperature. Yes. Rhett Dotson Yeah. Did y'all did y'all see a lot of that? Mohamed Elsiefy Oh yeah. Rhett Dotson I was about to say it should light up like a Christmas tree if you had a heated lawn. Mohamed Elseify And it has a very special signature. And the other one that has a special signature is loss of support in any way or form. You guys are more familiar with geo hazardous term than me, but soil liquification or anything like that? Anything in the in the boundary condition around the pipe, we see like a Christmas tree, as you said. Absolutely. Rhett Dotson That's really cool. Yeah. Would love to know more about that characteristic signature of either the hot lines or the settlement. What's so cool though, is that, it's just it's appreciating how you develop a technology. And I see it through one lens, Mohamed. But the lens is much broader for the application. I think that that's really cool. Particularly like the construction threats and things like that, that you're right, bending strain a lot of times would be blind to or maybe we don't even have on our radar. So that's cool. Well, here's where I want to go. Tell us, what's the future of AXISS looking like? You don't have to give away any spicy details. You know, I'm not asking you to cook the fish for us, but. Christopher de Leon Or not cooking. We like sushi, too. It’s all about how you prepare it. Mohamed Elseify Let me. Let me talk sushi now. So, basically, ten years and we learned a lot. Basically. you know, as any tool, any new technology, you start there are some things that we can say missing. Okay. And we learned a lot over the last ten years. So, as you know, over the last couple of decades, all the technologies or the focus on technologies was basically to capture anomalies like meta loss, racks, dents. So, but the thing is, why do you do that. We do that because at the end of the day, those anomalies, they, compromised reduce the stress capacity. So, there have been voices for years. Guys, let's go and measure the total by axial stress status of the pipeline steel. So that's where we are going. So, we want to reveal more because at the end of the day no matter the data you have. There is an integrity engineer who's doing an assessment like yourselves. And this guy, if you don't give him the full set of data, he's going to make assumptions. Yeah. And for the sake of God and for human safety. Yeah. He better make a conservative assumption, right? So okay. But if you give the engineer a full set of data, a full state of axial stress, he's not going to make assumptions about the, residuals. He's not going to make assumptions about anything related to the stress. It's measured for him. Rhett Dotson That can have really big implications for even like conventional SEC particularly could begin to help us understand, you know, why we have SEC sometimes and lines operating below 60%, which in theory we shouldn't. All right. So, a next gen AXISS is going to give us bi axial stress anything else you can share? Mohamed Elsiefy Oh yeah. And one of the in my opinion, the shortcomings that we had is we were measuring only inelastic region, which basically was done because in the JIP, they said we want to be proactive. We don't care about the plastic for a moment. You know, we want to catch it in the elastic region. However, as you know, plastic region is very important and we are developing the technology. This technology will be measuring in plastic. We will deliver elastic and plastic stress and strain. Rhett Dotson In both directions? Mohamed Elseify In both directions. Rhett Dotson All right. Mohamed Elseify And this will help us in so many like the plastic deformation, the plastic range helps us here in areas like dents. Yeah. In areas close to girth welds where there are all sorts of heat and, stress concentration. It will help us to reveal a lot of things that is hidden, specifically the residuals. So that's number two. Number three. you know, we built it for geotechnical hazards. So, our actual resolution was one data pointing every one meter. Right now, the one that we are developing, we it's going to be one data point every 25mm. Rhett Dotson Once an inch. Mohamed Elseify Yeah. Once an inch. Exactly. And the main reason for that is we really want to focus on some issues related to the gas wells because it's causing a headache to. And there are so many issues like this is another conversation. So, we want to focus at this. specific high frequency. You know, so, and we believe that with this configuration, this will enable us to really, help to solve a lot of the mystery, as you mentioned, SEC, for now, we are not going local again. And this one, it's you know, we know it's important, but we are focused. We are laser focused on getting this the geo hazard configuration out pretty soon and basically master it. And then we can talk. Rhett Dotson Yeah fantastic. So, tell us a bit about that. What does that rollout schedule look like? I mean if I call you today can you have a tool on site tomorrow or when a when should we expect this to be market ready or market available? Christopher de Leon Roughly? Mohamed Elseify We are having our pilot runs this year. So, you can imagine soon. Christopher de Leon Yeah, that's awesome. Rhett Dotson So, stay in touch. Should we expect any updates at IPC. Mohamed Elseify Most probably yes. Rhett Dotson That'll be September. That's Q3. I'm curious if you guys all have anything? Mohamed Elseify I think yeah, we should, we should because if we have the pilot runs in Q2, we should present our results in at least the discussion. Rhett Dotson Okay. well, man, this has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate you coming on. Tell us all about it. It's exciting to see. It's exciting to see this technology. Not saying stagnant, but moving forward. I am really curious. Again. Sometimes you don't know what you have until you actually start putting it in the pipeline. Mohamed Elseify But then as you start talking about it, you start to see applications. And so, I think once we start running it, we're going to find more ways where we're going to learn things about the pipelines. We didn't know before, no question around that. When we started running access ten years ago commercially. Yeah. There is a huge difference from today about the learnings and the deliverables and how we customize the reports to serve. Like I told you, we went with the level of cracking. Rhett Dotson Mohammed on the scale of highlight technology age, you guys are like almost still infants. I mean, oh yeah, you think about MFL sometimes we're still learning about MFL, sometimes much less geometry. Well not really. I mean, like imagine this. I mean, there's still many ways there, their infancy. So, tell you what. I really want to thank you for joining us. We appreciate it. I tell you, to our audience, would really encourage you to take a look at the publications that Mohamed has done, even take a look at his publication this year and maybe find him at IPC, my friend, do you have anything else you'd like to say? Christopher de Leon No. We appreciate you thank you for coming out. Mohamed Elseify I want to thank you very much. We had a lot of fun, and I'm going to try the sushi at this place tonight. If I don't like it, I will not allow this to go out. Rhett Dotson All right, audience, thank you so much for joining us. We look forward to seeing you again. I am your host, Rhett Dotson. My co-hosts, we will see you in two weeks.