The (Humble) Dirt Merchant Returns to Discuss LiDAR

Rhett Dotson On this episode of Pipeline Things, we get a very familiar guest. The Dirt Merchant returns to us to talk about his IPC. I'm sorry, not his IPC publication, someone else's IPC publication. Christopher De Leon You got to give him credit for pulling a solid and representing Rhett Dotson He did he reps the topic of Lidar change and differencing and elevation models. It's a great episode if you are or aren't familiar with lidar and the use of it, repeat Lidar. I'd recommend you give it a listen. And thanks to the Dirt Merchant for repping the paper, he didn't author Rhett Dotson Boom! All right. Welcome to today's episode of Pipeline Things. I am your host, Rhett Dotson, my co-host, Christopher De Leon. And we are again here to talk about IPC and the publications that went on in 2022. But before we do that, brief personal catch up. Chris, how's life man? Have you seen the latest Marvel movie? Christopher De Leon I have not seen the latest Marvel movie. I know I'm going to make a confession. I don't know if the movie that you're talking about is really my cup of tea. I feel like the first one was cool. Rhett Dotson I thought we were going to see it together. Christopher De Leon Yeah, I haven't seen the last one, but like, the first one was kind of surprising. Rhett Dotson So, audience, we're talking about Deadpool and Wolverine and I'm a little in shock, that Chris hasn't seen them. Christopher De Leon Like, here's my thing is, like any of you watch. And if you watch the Marvel movies, if you saw the first at Deadpool, you were surprised. You were like, this is a funny movie. And then I felt this fit in the second movie. I felt like eh. Rhett Dotson Okay. Christopher De Leon And then I talked to friends, and they were like, it's a lot like the second movie all over again. Rhett Dotson I thought we were going to see it together. Christopher De Leon It reminds me of kind of Guardians of the Galaxy one. Rhett Dotson I thought we were going to see it after this. I thought that was the plan. Oh well okay. Next topic. Christopher De Leon Next topic. Yeah. It's summer. Rhett Dotson Man, it is. It's crazy hot outside, right? Survived hurricane barrel, which is good. I was on vacation when it came through. Christopher De Leon So, you know, house cleanup is always interesting, right? So, barrel. For those of you that know, created a lot of havoc in Houston, and some people got it bad because of their own trees. The trees were like the thing for our neighborhood. We live in a place that has “forest” in its name. We have a ton of trees. Yeah, there's houses everywhere. So, we've spent a lot of time cleaning up our house, making sure it's back to normal, replacing 80ft of fence like it's this whole effort, right? And normally when people walk by my house, they're surprised because my fence is up and there's a bunch of debris because a lot of people are still just recovering. So, I'll see a lot of the walkers walk in. There's kind of stuff in front of my yard. Just kind of look around like, oh, look at these guys. And yeah. So, it's interesting when people just decide to walk up and start judging your house, after a storm. Rhett Dotson Yeah. You know, my biggest problem is when I got back, I couldn't run the robot mower for, like, it's like a week, man, because I had to pick up all the trash in the front yard. The robot mower doesn't do well. I can't go over, like, big sticks, stuff like that. So, yeah. Christopher De Leon Yeah. You know, when everybody said it's not ultimate flex was the week after barrel was. I was having a whole home generator and having your robot keep your lawn clean. That is Rhett. Rhett Dotson It is true. I am very proud of my, my lawn mower. In fact, my brother-in-law. Christopher De Leon I want to say that. So, if none of you have experience looking at someone's lawn that is maintained by one of these robots, it is incredible. So, I will say that so probably doesn't take care of like trimming very well, like the edges like an edger would. But it draws out these perfect. And because it does it week after week or day after day after day, but it builds up. And so, these lines are phenomenal. So, I go to Rhett’s house and I'm seeing this thing and it's running around his yard. And I'm like you know the only thing I could think of was movie Dune. So I was like, I, I've had some fun with it. You guys haven't seen it? Check our LinkedIn post. But dude, though your lawn is incredible. Rhett Dotson You know what else is great? It was, while I was gone, my brother-in-law stopped at the house and he was looking at it, working out front. And a neighbor came and approached him and started to think it was me. Started asking about the lawn mower complimenting him about my yard right and you know, he did not take credit for it. He did not take credit for the lawn. He told the neighbor that I would be back, and then my neighbor could ask me all about the robot lawn mower and what brand and type and stuff like that. Christopher De Leon So, you know, you haven't ever seen her but my oldest daughter loves watching influencers, and they're like, click the link below. Rhett Dotson If D2 doesn't work out, that's where I'm going. Christopher De Leon We get the link put it in the podcast and we could get a little kickback. Rhett Dotson Absolutely 100%, you know, I don't know if our guest today is an expert on robot lawnmowers, but we can ask him. I do know he's not native to the Houston area. I do know that so well, I guess, you know, I guess we must bring him on. So, are you going to go get him? Christopher De Leon Hell no. He's a regular. Rhett Dotson Yeah. It's true Alex. Come on, man, you can. Come on. Sit down on yourself. So. Well, full disclosure, the audience before we brought him on, he said that the walk in process is awkward. And so, we decided to make it even more awkward. So. Hey. Welcome, Alex. So, for the you listeners out there, Alex McKenzie Johnson, Geosyntec, is here with us again. The dirt merchant returns, return of the dirt merchant. Alec McKenzie Yay! I'm happy to be here in person and it is awkward. You got to kind of, like, pull out your chair and sit down. You know, there’s no smooth way to do it right? Rhett Dotson You could come in and do smooth dance moves like Christopher and I do. I mean, you see. Christopher De Leon Only people who watch YouTube and know that they also see when somebody wants to shake your hand, you don't meet them halfway, like, all that stuff that happens, you would never see that if you don't watch the YouTube. Rhett Dotson I was inspired by the Olympics. That's why I did the whole 360 thing with you right there. Christopher De Leon Why do you think I am wearing the jersey? And USA has a lot of champions, females seem to be leading the way. Rhett Dotson So, Alex, this is the IPC series, and we brought you on, to talk about the IPC 2022 publication, a deep dive into the use of LIDAR change detection analysis for regional landslide monitoring in the Appalachian Basin region of the U.S. Besides that, the title being a mouthful, and I do understand, I, I just realized when we got here, you're not even author on the paper. So, I wanted to acknowledge to the audience the authors of this paper, Bailey Taro, Christopher Markley, and Tara Metzger, are the authors. You don't even get an honorable mention, but somehow. Christopher De Leon It’s kind of like your brother getting credit for your yard Rhett Dotson Yeah, exactly. I mean. But you're going to talk about the paper, right? Alex McKenzie Well, I mean, in fairness, I tried to offer my paper that I wrote, for IPC 2022. You guys weren’t interested. You wanted to talk about this one? Rhett Dotson What was the name of it? I want to see if I remember it, what was it? Alex McKenzie It’s got landslides in it, but in fairness, you know, we've got a great bunch of geologists adjacent to, like, and do a lot of similar work. But, yeah, we give a lot of opportunities for people to publish papers. And Bailey, Chris and Tara do a great job, and I'm excited to talk about their work and the work that we do. Rhett Dotson Did you at least review the paper? Alex McKenzie I reviewed. Rhett Dotson Okay, so you're familiar enough with the paper to talk competently to the audience, right? Alex McKenzie And I did get Bailey's permission to discuss the paper on this podcast. So, this is something she is aware of. Rhett Dotson And let the record show we invited Bailey to do the podcast, and she deferred to Alex. Christopher De Leon No, she turned it down, it’s a shut you down type of situation. Rhett Dotson And now that's on record. That's on record. Alex McKenzie I think she listened to a couple of your podcasts. She's going to catch this one now. Rhett Dotson The dirt, the dirt merchant tests. decline. No. But in all seriousness, tell us a little bit, if you don't mind. The audience already knows you, so we'll skip introductions for this guest. We will skip introductions. But tell us a little bit about the paper, if you don't mind. What was, what was the genesis? What's the idea behind it? How did it find its way into IPC 2022? Alex McKenzie Sure. So, yeah, the overview, the papers, it's looking at how lidar is being increasingly used to identify new landslides, to monitor, existing landslides and changes in these, these landslides. The paper was looking at the application of about 1400 pipeline miles in, Appalachian Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, the time span of the original letter collection started in 2015. And then going up to, shortly before the date of the publication of the paper. The importance of what it's looking at and just kind of talking about the, the podcast ahead of time is it's showing how this technique of using lidar repeatedly, so repeatedly collecting lidar and analyzing the change is increasingly becoming a tool in pipeline operators toolbox to monitor geo hazards and to identify new ones the before and after the baseline assessment. So you kind of think about the original lidar uses of what our pipeline companies were to identify geo hazards from some kind of baseline lidar. And then starting in the late 2010’s, the pipeline operators started to realize, and you could do repeat lidar by starting in the same areas, and you can very accurately identify changes to those landslides or new ones that are formed after the baseline. Rhett Dotson So, you know, you're describing actually a very similar trajectory that I felt like, bending strain, was on. I remember 2017. When I really started getting into bending strain data, I'd say amongst the large operators, you probably had maybe 30% of them that we're doing bending strain the first time in 2017. And we had very few comparisons in 2017.I mean, it was probably 2% of all the assessments we were doing. And then over a span of 5 to 6 years, I mean, you look at now, I feel like we probably have of the major operators of north of 50% that are actively doing bending strains on at least a subset of their pipelines, and it's a much larger portion that are doing comparisons. but what drove the ability to do it in bending strain was, was regulatory. Right? So, if you had to go 5 or 7 years between an assessment, it meant that oftentimes you had to wait another 5 to 7 years to get that data set. Is that like a similar trend that you're seeing with, with lidar data here? Alex McKenzie I think so I think that, you know, kind of going back to I mean, it's kind of helpful to talk about the origin of lidar in terms of how we use it now. So, the original lidar collection kind of widespread areas was started in the late 1990s with government agencies at the time. It’s very expensive, very low resolution compared to the, the lidar that we have today. So, you have much higher cost, much lower resolution. You can kind of think of it like, I don't know if, like when you're a kid and you go over to, like, your rich friend's house and they bought like a 35- or 40-inch TV. Right. Rhett Dotson CRT projection. Alex McKenzie Super expensive. But even then, it's still fuzzy, right? Like you're trying to watch football, and you think the ball over there, you know, or you can watch hockey on if you remember, like when, Fox started doing like the light up puck, because the resolution is so low, you couldn't actually see where the puck was. Rhett Dotson And nobody in Texas watched hockey. Alex McKenzie You kind of fast forward over time, when pipeline companies started to do geo hazard programs and assessments. They primarily use these public sets, which at the time were spotty and available and most places didn't have them, and you get a pretty low resolution. So you get a lot of, false positives, false negatives from these kind of early use of lidar, but it's still way better than what they had, prior to the use of lidar kind of fast forward to the 2010’s and, when I was working at Ken Morgan, we realized we were getting way too many false positives and false negatives from using the government data that was available at that time. And some places didn't have lidar at all. So, we did an experiment. What would be the cost to get our own lidar and start to process it and instantly realized that this greatly improved the accuracy of our landslide identification a little bit later. So, what if we went back and did it again and we compared the two, and we didn't invent that process? More people were already doing repeat lidar, but limited locations. And we found that that was a relatively straightforward process to compare one model or dataset to another. And it was very, very accurate. We're able to identify, significant changes, including on pipeline right of ways from landslide and some other geo hazard effects that, like the arial troll or drought control, had not picked up because this were happening under, thick tree cover, which lidar was able to map. Rhett Dotson So, take a ballpark. What percentage of operators would you say are actively using lidar now? Give me a me a lay the landscape. Alex McKenzie So, you know, one of the big developments that's happened since that time is the, the USGS United States Geological Survey, right, has of being called the 3D Elevation Program. And they've been compiling public lidar across the US. And then areas that don't have existing lidar are collecting new lidar. So, I think last time I looked they're up to about 85, 90% coverage of the US. And they are making an advantage now is for those, pipeline companies. They're just starting to have geo hazard programs. They're able to go to this public data set. But that was much higher resolution that used to be available, covers much more of the country. And they're able to use that for baseline mapping. So pretty much all pipeline companies now that are doing after geo hazard programs are using LiDAR, either collecting their own or go into the public. Rhett Dotson And what percentage of companies do you think that is? Just ballpark it. For me, it's just a guess. Alex McKenzie That's a tough one, it's a tough question because I think you have several companies. Rhett Dotson Let the record say he refuses to answer. I've asked it twice, Chris, do you think it'll answer? Christopher De Leon It's almost metallurgical. Rhett Dotson Hold on. I was just going to say is it 20’s, 30’s, 40’s? Alex McKenzie Dave Johnson said that the same thing applies for geologists and metallurgists. Rhett Dotson Exactly. All right, well, tie an arm behind your back and get you to make an answer for me. Alex McKenzie But I was going to say by pipeline mileage, it's a very high percentage. So, the big companies are looking at lidar. I'm going to ballpark that and say 70-80% of the pipeline miles. but there's all these smaller companies that are in various stages of maturity with their integrity programs, and I don't know how many. Rhett Dotson Yeah. So, 70 or 80 are doing first time assessments. And I'm curious. Yeah. How many of them are on repeat assessments. Where's the market on repeat assessment. Alex McKenzie It's much smaller because the repeat assessments you must collect yourself. There is not a government agency that's doing repeat lidar. So that's where companies must decide where to do it. And you know, what's the, the resolution, the frequency. Christopher De Leon That’s still a big advantage, right? Because a lot of times, I mean, if you think of baseline assessments, like if you have a decent sized network, it's where do we start? And so where do I put my initial dollars? Because you want that to be representative of where you think you have a threat. So, the USGS is already giving you a ton of that baseline information where, you know, it gives you a lot of grounds to say, you know what, I can focus my research is in evaluating my baseline. Rhett Dotson Could you imagine if the federal government paid for all the original inline inspections for the baseline assessments? Christopher De Leon Can I imagine it? Yeah, I can probably imagine it. But we would be in a very different spot. Rhett Dotson Yeah. But that's the equivalent. I mean it's amazing that that a data set that can be used to perform a baseline with some reasonable degree of accuracy is out there. Right. And that just opens the door for operators to add on top of it. Alex McKenzie It's, game changer. Right. One of the big, obstacles for a lot of companies to do, geo hazard programs was if you have 10,000 miles of pipeline and you're looking at collecting 10,000 miles lidar, and you don't already have that as part of your budget, and it's not required by regulation. You know, it's hard to find the money for that, but it's a lot easier to go to the USGS instead of having to pay, a geologist to review the state. and find ideally those few hot spots where I need to really focus my future assessment efforts on. Christopher De Leon So, you mentioned, change analysis. Right. And so, you know, it's fair to say a lot of our audience is probably comfortable with ILI data, maybe less comfortable with lidar data. So, give us a comparison. Right. So, for us, when we look at ILI data, we do comparison. A lot of times you can have different ILI companies that provide the data. And we have processes for comparing them. It's usually not the full line. You know, you're not going to inspect all 30 miles, signal to signal. We have all to process. We're really focusing, like you said, on hotspots, right. Places where we know that we can pull up the data on both and compare them and say, hey, I think I compare this data set to that and draw conclusions. You know, we normally look for things like evidence of change, that can be done by one of the vendors or a consultant. What does it look like if an operator is trying to make a strain change? Right. Is that a specific consultancy? Is that the lidar companies themselves, or is it something that takes six months? Is it a day? Give us, you know, the quick and dirty on it. Alex McKenzie Yeah, that's a great question. So, one of the things that's nice about lidar data, if both datasets are collected, with high quality data and they're using proper survey control, you can you're pretty much agnostic in terms of the source. And there's, there's two basic ways you can make the change. The simplest and easiest method is to output the results in what's called a digital elevation model. You can think of this basically as a very fine grid where each cell is assigned an elevation. And so, in essence, you're just laying over one foot over the other and you're subtracting out the difference. Right. And so, then you, your resultant grid is, is showing the differences between the two. And you can use that to visualize. Or you can use it to you know, screen out various things, identify where these changes are happening. A little more complicated process is, taking to the point cloud itself. So, you look at the virtual light data, it's getting all these points, and you just collect that, the differences in the points between the two surveys. Christopher De Leon So, these processes are pretty good at aligning them. Right. So, for example, with ILI there is something fixed that if you have all these points, you know you guys it's not as complicated. There’re established processes for doing point to point. Alex McKenzie If the original data collection is good. It's very straightforward. In fact, it's almost you can think of like you get these DMs within minutes, even seconds. Sometimes you can tell your GIS system to deal with some rough output from that. So, it's a basic GIS process. It's kind of almost magical that here is this thing that's fast at average data. You can do it so quickly. And in most cases, it's pretty accurate. Now you might want to do other things to align the data a little bit better to smooth it or clean it. It might take a little bit more time, but the basic idea is simple. Christopher De Leon So, the difference here, right? I mean, for us to do a run comparison on ILI normally it's a couple of weeks, right? Just the whole process. I heard you say a couple of seconds, two minutes here. Alex McKenzie But that's getting the right outputs, that getting it on the grid. Now the harder part is going through what does it means. Right. And it's a lot like what you guys do with bending strain. Right. Anybody can do a bending strain calculation? What does it mean? And that's where the analysis comes into it because you're going to get change all over the place. You can see things so sensitive. You can see things like anomaly digs where they change the soil. You can see the slight difference in elevation between before and after they did the anomaly dig. Even though it's the people on the on the site, it's going to look like they put it back at the same elevation right. You can see where people are building houses. You can see where streams are changing, position. And you can see things like landslides. Christopher De Leon But now that's the person what you're seeing. Right. So, once you have, you know, change results, you now need the human presence to go in and identify these. Alex McKenzie That's right. And I know there's probably a lot of the audience thinking, okay, what about AI or machine learning? And of course, there's hot topics and people are looking into that. Christopher De Leon I just want to drag and drop. Yeah. And then I have boxes. It tells me where to go look. Alex McKenzie Right. But you can think about it like, you know, you’re very familiar with ILI processes, right. Even with things to automate, to speed up the process, you always have a human analyst. Christopher De Leon You want to leverage experience. Rhett Dotson I'm going to guess it's probably like bending strain. It'll catch something like 75% of the features. But then it's that 25% pull that usually a lie on the extremes. It's either something you really should be concerned about or totally benign. And it's like that's where the computer has trouble categorizing that correctly. And the consequences are usually most significant for it. Alex McKenzie Right. And I guess the other big challenge with this is, you know, you're looking at lidar of data sets. You're looking at three dimensions, right? And you're looking ILI, you're looking in in two dimensions. Right. And so, you have to have not just the right of way the pipeline. You must look all the area around it. And so, you know, on a computer a lot of things are going to look similar. So, there's going to be some kind of change that's happening. So, asking is that change because someone built a house, or is that because there's, you know, a landslide? Is that because somebody over here is digging some dirt out to put someplace else? Christopher De Leon The advantage, obviously, is that we're kind of going on for like a tangent a bit, but the idea is yeah, these automated systems allow you to use your time efficiently. Rhett Dotson So, we're going to take a break real quick when we come back. Audience I want to get into what you get from the differencing because Alex talked about that. But I want to talk a little bit about the maybe the difference between horizontal and vertical and maybe some of, if you're interested, what you would get from this type of assessment. So come back right from the break. So welcome back to Pipeline Things. We're in the middle of our discussion on the IPC 2022 paper that the dirt merchant did not author nor was he mentioned in the credits, but apparently was cited but is yet competent to discuss the matter. I can't get over it. So, but we're having fun at your expense Alex. It's a wonder you came back to the podcast. It is really wonder why did you come back? Alex McKenzie I guess I'm just a glutton for punishment. Christopher De Leon But we enjoy having you. Alex McKenzie Other people say so many nice things about me all the time. Occasionally it’s nice to have the ego taken down a little. Christopher De Leon It kind of makes you wonder why Bailey didn’t show up right? Rhett Dotson She's probably watching and is like, there's no way we're going on with those idiots. So, hey, going back, you talked about how, and I appreciate you talked about how lidar works. So, in the concept of a digital elevation model, and for those who are not on the YouTube channel, I'm sorry. Right. If I had two planes of paper like this and they're digital elevation models, if it goes straight down, the measure of vertical difference is easy to see. But if one plane slides perfectly relative to the other, how well does the digital elevation model or changes in the DM work? In that case, can you elaborate on that a little bit? Alex McKenzie Yeah, that that's a great point, Rhett, because you are right at an individual location you're showing a vertical change. Right. But it's the aggregate of change that you're seeing. And so, you think of a landslide. It's got a drop down at the head. You have this downward movement. And then at the toe you've got an upward movement. Right. And so, from the identification of recognition of the movement, that's one of the signatures you're looking for. You're looking for the decrease in elevation. And then increase in elevation someplace else. You can also think of because the lidar is so sensitive right. You can see where this displacement is happening. So, you can see like a landslide. It's moving. You can see it was here and again apologies for those who aren't on the, the video, but you can see it then lengthening and moving downslope. Right. So, you can see now you know the toe was here. Now it's further down the, the slope. And so, you can measure that change that happens as the landslides move. You can also because you know what the slope is, you can use that to deduce the horizontal movement from the vertical movement. Right? Okay. You can measure the slope of them. Rhett Dotson So rather than explicitly measuring you can kind of estimate horizontal movement. Alex McKenzie Yeah. And if you do not know the point-to-point measurement, as we talk about there's the two methods, right. There's the DM method, which is the most common method of doing change detection. The other one to the point to point, you can directly measure the horizontal, change that happens. Rhett Dotson So, you talked about landslides. I assume landslides are a given thing that you can find. And doing this type of assessment, I mean, what other things are you seeing when you're doing digital elevation model comparisons or a repeat lidar assessments? Do we have a cool name for it? Alex McKenzie We just call it repeat lidar, differential lidar. Rhett Dotson Yeah, there you go. So, what kind of things are you seeing out there? Alex McKenzie You know, I mean, I, I, I've always been a geo hazard guy, geologist guy, but during my time working I really advocated for the use of lidar or for other parts of the pipeline management. Right. Because you can see things like third party encroachments, you can see construction happening. You can see third party excavations that are shared right away. So, you can see, I mean, anything that's resulting in an elevation change around the pipeline, around the right of way, is going to show up in that differential ladder. And so, you can think of a lot of different applications for it. I know we're not talking about it now, but you can even use the base line of data, you can see things like vegetation encroachment where trees and things growing over the top of the, the pipeline too, to close to the pipelines. So, there are a lot of uses that, pipeline companies can put the lidar to. It's just I think it's kind of limited by the, the imagination and the, the availability of resources. Rhett Dotson Can you talk about the most shocking thing you ever saw was shocking. Most surprising? Shocking. I caught you off guard with that one. Alex McKenzie Well, I think one of the most interesting things it's kind of hard to describe is, it's basically a whole hillside moving with a differential leader that didn't really show up in the original assessment. So, we had, you know, the original assessment. Rhett Dotson You mean with the original lidar? Alex McKenzie The original assessment we were mapping this out didn't see it and then what you see is this entire hillside, very low side moving in a way that probably wasn't even visible on the ground. But you can see it, you know, clearly between these two, two images. So, like I said, it's really sensitive. I mean, I'd say it's more sensitive than, a good geologist being able to pick up these changes in movement. Rhett Dotson So, if we have differential lidar and Ai on one side and we have the dirt merchant and a right of way plane on the other, which one wins? Alex McKenzie The lidar every time. Rhett Dotson Wow. Yeah. So, I'm being a facetious example, but what you're indicating to me is that the use of this would be vastly superior to any form of visual inspection, you think? Alex McKenzie At least for these, these big, big areas where you're looking at, you know, tens, hundreds, thousands of miles of pipeline so, you know, in my career I used to do a lot of helicopter flights. Super fun. It's awesome to be flying around on a helicopter, but dollar for dollar lidar is vastly superior, you know, you think of, like, you know, if we're out here to look out the window, you see all these, trees in the background, a lot of pipelines right of ways look like that. You're trying to look down from a helicopter. You're flying 70, 80mph, which is not terribly fast, but you've got to look down through these trees, and you've got to be able to see some kind of landslide. All this tree covers the top. I mean, you're going to miss almost everything, you know, unless it's big. And if it's really, big, somebody's probably already know about it. So lidar is vastly superior to arial patrol even by, trained geologists. Christopher De Leon So, one of the things that kind of came to mind and we talked about this, you know, we had this discussion around monitoring and assessment. So, I just want to resurrect that. So, when we think of what you're just describing, when you do a baseline analysis. You're identifying where there's change. This is simple. Can you use lidar as an assessment? Right. Because when we think of assessment, we think about passing or fail. Right. So, the impact of the change happening on the pipeline, to what extent do we use lidar as an assessment, in your opinion? Alex McKenzie I think you can use that as part of the overall assessment. You know, we've talked a lot in this podcast about the importance of having multiple sources of information, particularly for geo hazards. You know, ideally, you've got lidar and you've got an idea of bending strain. Yeah. If it's a critical site, you know, maybe strain gauges and other pieces of information. But, you know, when you're watching this, you're looking at things that are way away from the pipeline so you can see, hey, there's a landslide. It's forming over in margin but it’s way away from the pipeline. And so, you can see that it's in the system where we're watching it we don't need to do anything more about that. So, you kind of pass fail for that feature. Now it gets a little more complicated if you see, hey, this change is happening right over the top of the pipeline, then, you know, ideally, you're bringing in other pieces of data. And maybe then you are doing a field assessment to say, okay, let's kind of ground this and see what this really looks like on the ground. You know, can we figure out, you know, if we don't have good depth cover for how deep is the pipeline and that area? Do we have other information that's going to help us decide whether this is a really an issue Christopher De Leon Yeah. So, this is really big on susceptibility. The key words here are susceptibility, monitoring, alerts, flagging all these things that say hey this needs attention. Alec McKenzie Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So, you kind of think of a typical kind of progression, you know. So, step one, you've got some kind of change. Step two what is it. So, you think someone built a house, or it’s a landslide but it's a long way away and we're going to mark it down. We're going to record it. We're not going to do anything else about it. It's like, okay, hey, you got a landslide on the right of way. Let’s trigger, field assessment. Let's get data from other data sources. And that's where, you know, the real damage is kind of having indiscriminate analysis of pipeline, but you can target that location, send somebody right there to that spot. You already know there's something happening there. And they can kind of get the information you need to make that decision, whether this is something you must do something. Rhett Dotson With all the value when you propose, literally, if you must choose between putting people in aerial patrol or repeat lidar, repeat lidar is superior. What do you think that holds operators back from widespread adoption of this? Alex McKenzie I think a couple of things. You know, we talked about it. It's a pretty new technology. But we you know, in our Clarion webinar, we talked about it. Yeah, it goes back to the 1960s. You know, a lot of cars and other systems use it, the technology. But the use for pipeline, the application applications is new. And, at least in, the US, the earliest to use some aware of is the late 20 tens. So, you think of like 2018, 2019. And so, you think of like kind of, how pipeline company budgets are built, you know, there's, there's, but this is the, the top priority is what are the things that are compliance based? What's required are regulation? And then you go down to things that they've been doing the kind of baseline cost way. Lidar, being new, hasn't worked as planned of the cost structure yet. More and more companies are adopting it. They are, you know, they're seeing the value and but I think with the, the key things that are helping out, one is that, kind of like the TV example that you think of, like how expensive a flat screen TV was, you know, when they first came out and then how cheap they are now and how high quality the images you can get. Lidar is going through that same curve. We're getting higher and higher quality, lower and lower cost. The cost is becoming more bearable. The other part, I think that's going to really kick it over, you know, just kind of like I'm talking about you have departments outside of just geo hazard departments. You have some departments begin to grow to use it for other purposes. And the cost then becomes more distributed to these companies. Christopher De Leon So, I mean, we've seen that a lot with ILI Data, right. Where you'll see once the data is in the GIS database, it's like, how can we use it? Clearly in our seems to have a similar path. Awesome. It's also the regulatory component. Right? I mean, you mentioned it right there are compliance based, and we are where we are because of some of our prescriptive regulations. And so, it's one thing to say, well, some would argue it's already prescriptive. Right. It's if you have the threat or if you don't know you have the threat, you need to go get the data. Rhett Dotson But for our public utility companies and those that serve the public utility companies, it's almost like, you know, I'm going to say it out loud, I can't believe we're saying this. I wish you had a publicly funded gathering of the lidar across the United States. I'm thinking of all the uses, right? Not only for pipelines. Right. You could use it for trans electrical transmission systems, some on or vegetation growth on the right of way. There are all sorts of stuff you could if you were gathering this literally. It has a significant number of uses. So, as we wrap up the show, Alex, what's in store for 2024 is, is our audience going to find you at IPC 2024? Alex McKenzie I will be there. Rhett Dotson Do you have a publication? Alex McKenzie I do have a publication Rhett Dotson Will you be claiming you're a coauthor? Christopher De Leon The question is will Rhett be claiming to be a coauthor? Rhett Dotson Yeah. So, we'll have it will host myself on the podcast next time. At least I can say I was on the publications. So, thanks. And we look forward to seeing you back at IPC 2024. Any closing thoughts on lidar before we before we let you go? Alex McKenzie First off, I always appreciate coming on the podcast. Great time. You guys do a great job. It's very entertaining. but, I think, you know, we've had a good conversation. You know what? I encourage: If you're not already doing baselines. I want to kind of give credit to the government, right. The USGS, the stewardship program, is a really great use of how our public dollars can provide public and private benefits. And it's really been very successful. So, for a lot of those companies that are kind of thinking about it, but are kind of afraid of the cost, this is a thing that can really help them turn to a better understanding, where they might have exposure to, to, to hazards. Rhett Dotson All right. Well, hey, Chris. Alex, that's going to wrap us up, to our audience. Thank you for joining us. And stick around. We'll be back in two weeks. And thanks. Catch you later. This episode of Pipeline Things is sponsored by D2 Integrity. The episode was produced by executive producer Sarah Roberts from ADV Marketing. Thank you to Alex McKenzie Johnson. The Dirt merchant, for appearing as a guest and the Geosyntec Consultants for letting us use their office for filming. Signing off, see you next time.