What’s the Deal with Water Crossings? With Fernando Curiel

0:00 Rhett: All right, on this episode of Pipeline Things, we have a lot of fun talking about organizational dependencies and culture, and the consequences of showing up late to the airport for family vacation. All of this and more while we tackle water crossings with Fernando Curiel. Thanks for joining us. (upbeat music) 0:37 Rhett: All right, welcome to this edition of Pipeline Things. I'm pretty excited about this episode. So, listener note—listener warning: this episode was requested by a listener or at least gave me the idea. That particular individual said, “Hey, um, I really think you need to do an episode on VIV.” And, I was like, “Sure, we can.” Um, and so before we get too deep down the episode, as we were preparing for this, and I really thought, Chris, you ever had an event happen in your life where you did something and as a result of that event, you're like, I will never, ever do that again. 1:10 Christopher: For me, it's the opposite. And I can perfectly describe it. And I'm totally going to throw you off your game here. 1:14 Rhett: Oh, you can try. Go for it, brother. 1:17 Christopher: I remember this one time, Rhett. I was at a conference, and I'm looking at the agenda and the agenda's crap for that time slot. And I'm like, none of this stuff matters to me. I'm a pigging guy, none of this is pigging. I guess I'll go sit in this talk. And it was crossings, so I go and I sit down, and then this guy, he walks in like 10 minutes late. 1:38 Rhett: Oh, this is how you're trying to introduce me. 1:39 Christopher: He walks in late— 1:40 Rhett: Gotcha 1:40 Christopher: He comes and he sits right in front of me, and they start talking about VIV and this guy just takes over the room, he takes over the conversation, he has all these opinions, I thought they were opinions because I didn't know anything about VIV at the time. 1:57 Rhett: Probably thought this guy's an idiot, I would get rid of this guy, who is this guy? 2:01 Christopher: And that was the first time I was introduced to Mr. Rhett Dotson 2:05: Rhett: Yeah, right. 2:07 Christopher: It was, VIV was the first time I saw you talk about anything. 02:10 Rhett: Sure, I know, but that's not the point. The point of my thing was— 2:13 Christopher: So I can tell you, now I randomly walk in topics that maybe are not that exciting to me just because you never know what's going to happen. 2:20 Rhett: Oh, it's a change of course, right? Gotcha, I should have framed it better. What I was thinking is more like when you do something, you're like, oh my God, I should not have done that. So, like I know, and you, and that's why I'm calling you out, and I tried not to do it, but I'm doing it anyway. 2:32 Christopher: But this goes two ways, by the way. 2:33 Rhett: Sure, you can. You missed the flight for vacation and your family lost 24 hours of vacation time because y 'all were late to the airport. The reason I use that is like, I am a non-late, non-rush to the airport type of person. 2:47 Christopher: Yeah. 2:47 Rhett: Cause I don't want to have that experience. 2:48 Christopher: You only do that with your family. You're lying. I've been with you when you're traveling solo because it's like me. It's on time, fast, efficient. 2:56 Rhett: Whatever. 2:56 Christopher: That doesn't work when you have four kids and your wife with you in tow. 3:02 Rhett: Sure, um, well, I think today's topic, we're going to be talking to the guests. And I think the guests works for a corporation that in my opinion, I think has the most mature water crossings program in the United States. And I don't mind saying that. I've told other clients that. But that water crossings program was developed on the back of a very painful experience. The painful experience that we're talking about, if the audience isn't familiar with it, is the Silver Tip Pipeline failure in the Yellowstone River. You can actually find the details of the report. This is from 2011. You can find it on PHMSA’s website. All of the information or anything that I talk about is only going to come from that. But, you know, and preparing for this episode, I went back and looked: The cost of that incident, Chris, $135 million at the time the PHMSA report was issued in 2010, which I'm sure is more now. The first thing that struck me is, oh, my God, how many integrity programs cost $135 million, you know in terms of mitigation. So, when we talk about this topic of VIV, or water crossings, the consequences are real. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, the incident occurred in July of 2011, and It was in Yellowstone County and it had 1500 barrels of crude oil were released into the Yellowstone River. That's from the executive summary in the FIMSA report. And the last statement I want to make about that failure is I've often been in conferences or in discussions with people and they're like, this VIV thing, Rhett. Like, is it really real? Like, can you point to a pipeline that has actually failed due to VIV? 4:49 Christopher: We're using an acronym that we have yet to define. 4:51 Rhett: VIV, yeah, it's just vortex induced vibration for our listeners out there. So vortex induced vibration is a phenomenon whereby when you get a fluid rushing past a cylindrical object it will oscillate back and forth in the eddies. I often tell people you see it all the time you just don't realize it. So the next time you get in your car, if you have an old-school antenna, look at the antenna in your car. I guarantee you it's got a helical wire that's wrapped around it. 5:16 Christopher: It does. 5:17 Rhett: That's for VIV. If you pass a chimney stack in a refinery, look at the chimney stack and I guarantee you will see a helical wrap going around that chimney stack. That's to prevent VIV due to wind, VIV. But in this failure report, in the back, if you read the whole thing, it's really fantastic. So, Rosenfeld and Greg Morris wrote the failure report for the incident, and they said that the failure mechanism I quote was “fatigue crack growth adjacent to a girth weld.” Skip down a few more sentences, It says the cracks “initiated and grew by fatigue due to vortex -induced vibration (VIV) of the exposed pipe in the river current,” which I thought, again, so for my listeners that are out there, our listeners, VIV is a real threat. It is not something that has never resulted in a pipeline incident, and when it did, it resulted in a very expensive one. And that very expensive failure led to, again, what I'm going to say is ultimately one of the, I think, most mature water crossing programs we have from any operator in the United States. And it's a pleasure for us to talk to them today about that water crossings program. So without further ado, I want to introduce our guest. Our guest is Mr. Fernando Curriel of ExxonMobil. So, Fernando, it is good to see you. For those of you who might know me, Fernando is a longtime friend. We've been working together for quite a while. Also, U of H graduate, which makes Chris extremely happy. And, um, both, uh, a close personal friend and colleague. So Fernando, welcome. 6:50 Fernando: Thanks, uh, for having me. I think you underestimate, I guess, the UH thing. It might've been the only reason I got hired to be quite honest with you. 6:58 Christopher We don’t talk about those things, ok Fernando? 7:00 Fernando: Ok. Um, but it was, okay, but yeah. 7:03 Rhett It's real. It's definitely real between the two of you. I got it. Chris was sold on you from moment one, you know, and I'm pretty sure it had something to do with the bear claw, but I was willing to, you know, let it go. 7:12 Fernando: Yeah. 7:13 Rhett: So, uh, well, thanks for being willing to talk to us today. So, um, Fernando, if you don't mind, will you introduce yourself to the audience, tell us a little bit about you other than the fact that you went to U of H and other than the fact that introduced you as an amazing engineer. Um, tell us a little bit about how you found yourself here. 7:26 Fernando: Right. So those two things are true. Um, I got hired on by two people that took a chance on me at Rosen. So I started my career coming out with a master's from UH and I kind of got thrown into pipeline integrity, and I was not really involved on the pigging side obviously with you guys. I was involved on the integrity services, consultant, post-ILI data stuff and enjoyed that for a while. Then I went to go work at an operator, enjoyed that a lot. So very different: managing assets, making decisions, understanding risk, and kind of making compromises, and then eventually it lined up that an opening started here in ExxonMobil and so, you know, I made my way here and so I went from a more lean organization to now this large organization with a lot more things that had been proceduralized and work. So, kind of all over the place, I think. 8:18 Rhett: Yeah, cool I tell you what, from my perspective it has been fun to watch. You know, so I've never had the—I've never had the pleasure, really, of being on the operator side, and you both have. And it's an experience I feel like is whole, and so it's been fun the last couple of years certainly to watch you grow in that role. And you know, unless something goes wrong, I don't think I will ever find myself at an operator unless it's like near the very end of my career as like an SME. But that would require some falling out between Christopher and I. 8:46 Christopher: So, something that he's curious is how would you describe your responsibilities right now at ExxonMobil? Because that way it kind of leads into the discussion we're going to have today. 8:55 Fernando: So, my base role, my title, is Pipeline Integrity Engineer. And so, I steward the integrity of pipelines. By steward, I'm saying I am in charge for a series of pipelines that are in an area. I'm in charge of anything related to their integrity, mainly focusing on those integrity assessments, right, the hydros, ECDAs, and ILI runs. But, because I have a somewhat unique skill set more in integrity, I've also been kind of helping out in a lot of different programs, like the seam integrity program, where I help out with the water crossings program, geohazards program, et cetera. So kind of everything integrity and everything pipelines. 9:35 Rhett: So, Fernando, when we talk about water crossing integrity management, obviously, the scope of this problem is huge, right, especially for a corporation like ExxonMobil, but honestly, any pipeline operator typically has a large number of water crossings if they operate a substantial mileage. So, I'm just going to jump right into it and say, where in your experience do you begin with this? Where does the water crossings integrity program start? 10:08 Fernando: So I have kind of two answers for this and I think unfortunately, sometimes you have to start by knowing that there is an issue or knowing that there is a threat, right. So like any other threat or like a very specific corrosion threat that you might be dealing with, if you don't know you have it, you don't necessarily address it, right. So, sometimes unfortunately, in general, an operator will have to have a failure or a related failure. Not necessarily a water crossing, but something that happens near that realizes that there were these factors here as well that you need to look into. So, unfortunately, that's a lot of times what happens. And, the other thing, if you kind of know that this might be a gap because you know there's crossings on your lines, then you really need to begin with what I call the inventory of your crossings, which is identifying what crossings do you actually need to do work in, and what are you going to do with those crossings, right? So that is also its own sort of process, because now with all the tools we have, you can do it with a lot of software and data sources that are free, or sometimes it just means a lot of boots on the ground going around and trying to find the crossings as you're going along the right -of -way. Some crossings aren't intentional or you don't know are there, or, you know, we go through a lot of landowner things so new crossings may appear sometimes, and yeah— 11:24 Rhett: Like new water crossings? 11:25 Fernando: Yeah new water crossings. 11:27 Rhett: Like seriously, you get a, like, what a new stream, new canal built across your pipeline that you weren't aware of? 11:32 Fernando Yeah, I mean hypothetically a farmer could build a stream for irrigation that's quite large and so that is now a new crossing that you may or may not have to deal with and so those things are true. So, I think at the end of the day you start with inventorying, finding out what you have to assess or look out for to manage a threat. 11:52 Rhett: Fantastic and like you said apparently there are both a lot of open source or free publicly available ways to do that if you're starting from scratch as an operator. So then once you get there, again, you have to get to thousands pretty quickly. I mean, I can't imagine, I mean, look, if you're an operator that's operating 1000 miles of pipeline, even a few hundred, when you count streams, ditches, everything, I mean, you get to a sizable number of crossings pretty quick. Once you got this huge population, what do you do next? What's step two? 12:24 Fernando: The outcome of step two should be determining which ones need more work. So that second step is going to be some sort of screening or prioritization process for what you found, really targeting, is this something within the scope of what our tools are able to assess or look at or work on, right? So, you may have something that is technically a crossing, but it's more of like what you would consider an exposed pipeline. Those might not really be applicable to a lot of these threats that your program has or that you want to use or things that recommended practices and standards exist to help manage, right? So that's potentially something that has to be a one-off and not necessarily stewarded under a larger program, or maybe it is. It just kind of depends. So again, that screening prioritization process I think is the second step we would take. 13:14 Rhett: So you screen, to make sure that I understand that, so you screen to look at a particular crossing and say this fits within my water crossing program, and I can assess it or it doesn't fit within my water crossing program and I don't need to assess it. Is that the question you're trying to answer first? 13:31 Fernando: Potentially. I think the crux of it, that should be the question that's being answered if you're starting from scratch as you probably would be right in the scenario that we're working through. 13:41 Rhett: I mean, so I assume, and I think that, look, I think water crossings are something that in general have gotten a lot of attention. I know they've gotten a lot of attention north of the border in Canada for quite some time. 13:52 Fernando: Yeah. 13:52 Rhett: I think here in the United States, they're certainly getting attention from exposures was a big one PHMSA said they were going to start focusing on, and, uh, I mean, I feel like in the last, I don't know, maybe three to five years, the number of requests I've gotten for eroding banks, exposed pipelines, seems to have gone up like an order of magnitude. So, the attention on it definitely seems to be real from an operator perspective. 14:16 Christopher: How would you describe, um, a common approach to identifying your inventory, right? Things that cross my mind are like aerial patrols, right? Is that part of their task? Is it walking the line on a mapping system through your GIS? Is it boots on the ground, field techs going out? Like, do you feel like there's gravity more towards one than another when you're building that inventory? 14:38 Fernando: I think if you are targeting building a water crossing program, you're going rely a lot on those aerial patrol type of technologies, and if you are potentially stumbling onto having a water crossing program, that will probably be driven by operations or things that are being done all the time. Because even when I've worked of other operators, it was kind of common knowledge within the operations groups. “Oh yeah, we have this issue that happens. We have to go fill it with dirt every few months.” 15:08 Rhett: It's part of right of way management. 15:08 Fernando: Yeah, so it gets captured in your atmospheric program right away, some damage prevention sometimes will catch it. It'll get caught by somebody. And so, you have to interface with that. 15:17 Christopher: Do you feel like that makes it—does that help streamline things, or is that maybe a little bit more complicated because it's outside of your potential integrity world? 15:25 Fernando: Yeah, I think that's organizationally dependent, right? Some organizations are a lot more cohesive with the different programs. Some are a lot more separate, right? So, some are different gears in the machine. Others are, yeah, these cogs are always talking to each other and moving so, it kind of depends. 15:41 Rhett: Yeah, so then once you identify them, and you get to the point where you want to assess it, and I assume this is where a lot of y 'all's learnings got it wrapped up into 1133. So, I know as an organization, Exxon had a lot of effort in developing the API RP 1133 standard for our listeners out there. Once you decide you want to assess it, what are you assessing for? 16:02 Fernando: So, there's a, okay, once you make a decision, the decision needs to be, “Is this in the scope of the water crossing program or is it not?” Right? Because we just mentioned, yeah, it might be part of what Chris called right of way management, right? Maybe it doesn't need to fall into your water crossing program. Maybe it needs to fall with your atmospheric program, right of way, something else, right? So, if it is water crossing, then you need to kind of understand, do you have all the data to even assess it? So, you need to have a process of, okay, we've identified it. Are there any missing data sources? And that's kind of what the next step would be before you determine, do we need to assess or do something else with this? 16:42 Rhett: And so, what type of data are we looking at gathering? Like when you, when you, when you identify something that you think falls in your crossings program, is it fair—I kind of want to create a picture for the audience. Is that typically an exposed pipe or is it the pipe that typically has the potential to become exposed? Or both of those? 16:58 Fernando: Both of those could potentially, right? So, if there’s like there's like intermittent streams because the pipeline goes through let’s say and area that has some sloping. There’s water runoff, and over the years, they've seen potential channels forming. They're like, this has potential to become a crossing. 17:12 Rhett: Gotcha. 17:13: Like, will it become a crossing? Then it might get stewarded under it before we have all the data. And then it's like, well, now we need to find out where the banks would potentially form, where is this going happen? Or if you know there's a crossing already, okay, is it exposed? We don't know. Maybe time to go send a survey out there. What does the actual river bottom look like? Well, you don't know, but that might be a key piece of information for knowing if you can assess it or what you need to do to assess it. 17:37 Christopher: So let's, if you don't mind— 17:40 Rhett: I do. 17:41 Christopher: Help frame: What are parameters or like key variables that would point a situation towards it would be part of a water crossing program versus not? 17:54 Fernando: Is it exposed? Does it see intermittent or continuous flow? And, do weather events change the landscape, I think, or some of the bigger ones? 18:04 Rhett: Interesting. Is it exposed? Is it intermittent? And does weather change the landscape, right? So, whenever you were talking about potential things, I started thinking back through my own experiences, right? We see it like Arroyos in West Texas. That's been a popular one I've been hearing about a lot lately, right? Whether it wasn't a stream here now or the stream was literally sometimes 30 or 40 foot away. Then stream migration has been a big one and like up in near Appalachia, I've worked on several of those where the stream more slowly migrates. It's not a sudden thing, but it's more of a in the last decade, we've been slowly expanding one direction or another. I've seen those pop up and those can lead to pretty considerable exposures, you know, well over, I think the longest one, it was like 120 feet, it was like a 4-inch pipeline, it's really small stuff. 18:50 Christopher: So um, so if we just follow that natural progression of integrity management, so it sounds like we're in the data gathering phase, right? So it's like inventory, plus data gathering, and then naturally, some would say maybe it's understanding risk? Before we start talking about assessment type is normally what one would think through but independent of the order just kind of talk us through, like “I have the inventory. I understand if I think it's going to be in the water crossing program. Now what?” 19:16 Fernando: Yeah, so if there are any data gaps that are critical to either doing a risk assessment or an engineering assessment to give you a, okay, we know that this threat might be applicable. So now we need to run down. So, I guess to the VIV, you guys have talked about this, right? So, is it exposed or not? We'll be the first thing. If it's not exposed, you're not going to get VIV, right? So, there's that, you know, there's like screening method. Then, okay, it is exposed. Well, now there's a data gap. How far is it exposed? Those are key parameters for that assessment. So the assessments that you're trying to do or the recommended practices that you're leveraging to determine if things are okay or not, need to guide what data pieces you gather, I think. And it's not anything new that I'm saying here. It's just, specifically for water crossings, that's what I see being done. 20:01 Rhett: So, before we get into either assessments or mitigations, which is going to be after the break, I want to go into the break and ask you a question. In those first two steps we take, so gathering the inventory and then gathering the data on the ones that are prioritized, what are the biggest pain points there? Or where do you have to make the biggest assumptions in most cases? 20:21 Fernando: Biggest pain points are getting surveys for things that are underwater, I would think, because those are potentially two things. One, it's expensive. And if you aren't convinced that there's a threat there, potentially it can be difficult to justify that expense as like a company, I think. And also, if you do think there is a threat there, you can't always just go inspect things underwater. There is a seasonality to this. So, picking the right time, or hey, maybe you're inspecting it, but you know that this is a low water level. This is not representative of the concern that you're actually trying to target, or maybe you identify something that might be a concern during a high-water event, so like a storm. Well, now you need to start trying to understand what assumptions are reasonable, what has been done in other places, maybe you need survey data, and knowing what information to get is sometimes kind of a pain point as well, because every water crossing can be somewhat unique, right? As opposed to something like a corrosion feature. Yes, they're all different, but they all, you know, you can do modified B31G on most corrosion features, right? And assess them that way. 21:31 Christopher: That's a great point. That's what I was going to be in my next question, right? The mechanics of evaluating this threat just feels different than when you're treating a more common threat like corrosion, which many people will feel comfortable with, right? It's, it's more straightforward, right? Whether it's field data, it's, “I'm still doing B31G calculation.” If it's ILI, it's still B31 calculation. If I'm trying to estimate failure, I could say, “Well, as long as it's not deeper than this or longer than this in a table, I determine if it's fit for service or not. This seems a lot more situational. It's not single-scenario is kind of what it begins to feel like. It's a little bit more data integration. 22:09 Fernando: Yeah, you do rely on that a lot, right? So, you need a data integrate. And I mean, ultimately, if you just think about, we all are engineers here, right? Well, claim to be engineers here. 22:20 Christopher: I'm not licensed. If you heard the previous episode, I do not have a PE. But I've already said— 22:27 Rhett Mic over here, voice over there. 22:29 Christopher: But I've already said, “Hey, if it is that important to you guys, I don't mind going to get it. 22:36 Fernando: All right, but yeah, I mean, so we're all engineers, but like part of being an engineer, right, is defining your problem. And with water crossings, it's a lot harder to define what is your problem? Like what is exactly the threat that you're looking at? Is it applicable and what data is important for it? As opposed to some of the other threats like corrosion where it might be a little bit more easy and routine to understand those parameters. 22:58 Rhett: That's what I was thinking, but when you broke out the cost, um, and I just want to, I want to dwell there just for a minute, like getting the, the water bottom on a large waterway is, is definitely a challenge, right? So, something like the Mississippi River, probably a challenge. Something like the Sabine River, probably a challenge. Red River, challenge. 23:15: Christopher: Atchafalaya 23:16: Rhett: Definitely a challenge, but you've got other smaller crossings, I would think that are probably easier, creeks and things like that. Does that tend to influence where you go get data first? Do you get data on your easier ones and then shelve the other ones? If you really have to make a case for, you know, budget to go do a phish, a sonar phish down there to get a bathymetric survey? 23:40 Fernando: Yeah, I think really, realistically we live in a world with, like, limited resources. So, you need to be using risk to drive some of those decisions, and if you don't know enough on like the likelihood of something happening, then you can kind of rely on “Okay, what consequence?” So, a smaller exposure, it's easier to say, “Well, we're not necessarily as concerned.” “We can get people out to this one,” right? So we know that we'd be able to respond. “This one is out pretty, pretty far out, but it does get to a drinking water intake if it were to spill here.” This is something that we have very little control, hard to respond. 24:17 Rhett: I like that, I like that. 24:18 Fernando: And you need to kind of play with that side of it too. 24:20 Rhett: Thank you, that makes a lot of sense, Fernando. Okay, when we come back, I want to talk a little bit more about that risk and consequence side, maybe talk a little bit about mitigation. So, audience, hang on, and we'll be right back with our guest, Fernando, in just a moment. (upbeat music) 24:39 Rhett: All right, welcome back as we continue our dive into water crossings programs with our guest Fernando Curiel, and so, you know again just recapping the first part we talked a lot about, “Hey where do you begin if you're an operator?” is first and foremost, you begin with an inventory, then after you get an inventory there's data collection, data integration, and risk assessment, which Chris likes to say, “Oh, that's just a standard program.” And I started thinking about how this might actually impact you if you are planning a trip with your family to the airport, right? So, what you would probably do first and foremost is have an inventory of the number of times you need to go to the airport and what you need to make sure to bring with you. And then you would gather data. How soon do I need to leave? How long does it take me to get to the airport— 25:25: Christopher: And is terminal C shut down, so you had to go to D and D sucks. 25:29 Rhett: Is terminal C or D or B—what's the likelihood either of those events occur so you can make an appropriate risk-based decision and make sure that you don't miss vacation. 25:39 Fernando: How much does a new ticket cost, right? To reschedule all those things. 25:42 Rhett: I don't even think he had that option. This was like, yeah, this was just go home with a family for 24 hours and enjoy staycation. 25:48 Fernando: Oh my. 25:49 Rhett: So, um, It's great. Yeah, I really, really hope Amanda listens to this. 25:54 Christopher: It was a lot less than, how much did you say, a $135 million? It wasn't that expensive. So different consequence. Yes, you're planning to the airport and planning your water crossing program— 26:05 Rhett: You probably got such great looks. Such great looks all the way home. You probably got $135 million dollar looks. 26:09 Christopher: 26:09 Yes, the family got to pick what we eat for lunch. That's all I'm saying. And I will not go to Terminal D anymore. I will go through C or E and take the train or walk. Fact. 26:19 Rhett: So Fernando, going back. So once we've got to that point, and I want to ask you one question, just following up on that, is I started thinking for operators that might be thinking, “Where's, where's, do you feel is the most effort and resources in those first two stops? Do you feel like it's, it's much more difficult gathering your inventory or it's much more difficult identifying the ones to assess and gathering data on those? 26:43 Fernando: It depends on what your organization is better geared towards. Some organizations will have better GIS programs that can help them do the inventory. Other organizations may rely a lot more on boots on the ground type of approaches. And so that may seem more onerous at first. It just really depends on how they choose to do those. And then data gathering is always potentially a Pandora's box that can lead to quite a bit of issues, because I can't tell you how many times I've heard somebody say, "Hey, we want to gather LiDAR data," and they do gather it, but they don't have it in a way that's usable. And so sometimes that can be a frustration a lot of times because you're spending money, you think you're doing things and it's not necessarily the data you need or in the format you need. So, I think a lot of those learning curves kind of will depend on what's more onerous. 27:38 Rhett: That's cool. 27:39: Christopher: Your organizational reference, I think is the most key, right? Cause it's easy to find paralysis by analysis with any threat, right, depending on the mileage of pipe that you have. And obviously there are tools that we don't talk about on our podcast, right? So there's probably somebody that is very GIS savvy that says, "Oh, there's an Esri plugin for that, and we can look for search windows of X, Y, or Z." But even at that point, it's feeding, you might have an inventory, but now doing the prioritization, again, in itself based on your staffing and what data you have available. And like you said, the cohesion of systems between field and /or your office can always create challenges, unfortunately. 28:19 Rhett: Um, we talked about determining risk, right? And risk is, um, probability of failure times consequence of failure. I had to stop and think about that, actually. I couldn't get the right word out. 28:31 Christopher: Good job. 28:32 Rhett: Thank you. So, when we talk about, um, consequences of failure, um, is, is there really much variation there? I mean, I assume probability of failure, there's, there's, that would be based off of the data and the assessment that you do. But is there really much variation on the consequences side when you're evaluating risk from y 'all's perspective? Or is it like, look, all consequences are essentially, you stay away from, it's all equal, so to speak. 28:59 Fernando: So it depends. And I'm going to say that a lot because 29:03 Rhett: Are you a metallurgist? 29:04 Christopher: No, because he didn't say on one hand. 29:07 Fernando: No, on both hands, it depends. Like, You're asking here, like what are all consequences more or less the same, but the reality is it does depend on how your organization treats consequences as well, right? Because you could say, hey, I have a product running through here that is ethane, right? Ethane is not going to spill into this waterway that's, you know, above the water. It's going to vaporize. There's not a consequence of its vaporizing into the atmosphere in the sense that like, you know, product into the ground, or you could say, “Oh, but the line next to it, that is a gasoline line. There is potentially a huge consequence because not only is it spilling to the waterway, but now it could potentially ignite. There are other sources of ignition.” So really quickly, you can get that two lines, you know, depending on the product could have very different consequences. And how an organization looks at that would matter because some other organizations like, look, every release it's the same, we absolutely not, no difference, right? No, not at all. 30:12 Rhett: So now I want to get to my favorite part of the thing. And thank you for that. That was, I always forget, again, the difference in the products could very easily result in difference and consequence. That was useful for me. It's kind of like one of those light bulb moments. It seems simple enough, but I enjoy it. Mitigation, right, so mitigation is a topic that's close to my heart because I feel like for— 30:35 Christopher: Are you going to skip assessment? 30:36 Rhett: No the dirt marks, and that wasn't one of the things we had in the notes. There's no assessment part in the notes. What did you want to say? Assessments wrapped down. I mean like if you want to know the assessment methods I'd say go look at 1133, right like there's assessments for addressing strength and assessments for addressing VIV right? Once you determine that you have crossed a limit in either of those, then you must mitigate, right? And mitigation is another, I think, I think it's a popular topic, usually because of the expense associated with it, and sometimes the challenge associated with it, and sometimes the environmental consequences associated with it. All of those make mitigation of water crossings very difficult. And I'm just curious, like kind of what is your experience or the approach to mitigation? How do you look at the suitability? When we talk to the Dutch merchant, for instance, he's like, “Dude, I'm so tired of seeing people just drop concrete mats on things.” And I always see these funny pictures of pipelines with concrete mats hanging off of them in creeks 'cause it just eroded underneath 'cause it really wasn't suitably designed. So I'm just curious, experiences and thoughts on mitigation. 31:39 Fernando: So it is very organizationally dependent in the sense that— 31:43 Rhett: Is that the fifth time we've used that this episode? 31:46 Fernando: Yeah, and I think it is because You're saying mitigations, right? And so realistically if you're going mitigate you can mitigate or do like a this is going to solve our problem for now, and we think it'll mitigate some of that consequence, or you could do a mitigation that's like, “We are trying to eliminate this consequence from happening, right? And so obviously there's going to be different costs, different levels of effort, different timelines associated with all of those. And you need to balance them kind of understanding the risk first. So I think some organizations will be more on the side of we want to eliminate this risk and never have to deal with this again. We're going to do an HDD under this water crossing 32:27 Christopher: So that’s prevention. 32:27 Fernando: Yeah, which is we want to— 32:19 Christopher: A lot of times they'll those go hand in hand, right? So in your integrity plan, you don't always jump to mitigation, right? It's P&M, right? Prevention and mitigation. Depending on, like you said, potential consequence of failure, or just ability to maintain or desire to maintain, right? Like a lot of times, if we look at different type of asset owners, we've heard this from different type of clients where they're like, “We don't do assessments, we replace.” 32:54: Rhett This is true. 32:55 Christopher: Right. And so again, it's not mitigation. It's prevention. 32:58 Rhett: Yeah. So, in that case, in this context, I'm not saying this is obviously not y 'all's perspective, but some operators that might look like, “Hey, if we have the potential for exposure, HDD, there's no middle ground,” right? We're going to go under it. So, from a organizational standpoint or organizational tolerance standpoint, how often do you find that that's the easier route to go? Is it just fire and forget in terms of, Hey, we HDD, we don't have to worry about this anymore? 33:31 Fernando: So, in a sense, it's easier, right? Because an HDD is, in my opinion, a little bit easier to accomplish than doing a complex mitigation where you're like stabilizing a bank. There's a lot of parameters you have to worry about, okay, what happens if you have this this level rain event and then like you get this much water into the soil, what slopes, what are the angles, right? So, in a way, I think it's a simpler option. It's just usually a little bit more expensive. So that's where it comes in. And it's also when you're doing some of these mitigations, some products or some lines, it's easy to hot tap into. Other lines, due to like their parameters, it is a lot harder to hot tap into. Some, you need a downtime, others you're going to need no downtime you can do it live and you'll just like tap in go in, so all those things need to be taken into consideration. So, realistically, I've seen with other people that I've talked to in this industry that there has been a lot more work trying to understand the threats before going to the mitigation and usually going a little bit overboard on mitigations to prevent it or just get rid of it, don't worry about the threat, which makes sense because you don't want to spend a lot of money and then not really have mitigated it, just had the illusion because you spent a lot of money. 34:45 Christopher: All you did was delay it, which is what mitigation is, you changed the local environment and now in time, you deal with those consequences. 34:52 Rhett: And, that's becoming more of a challenge. So I know in a lot of places in the Northeast, it's not easy, even if you want to do a mitigation, they want all native materials, like, so the go to for a lot of operators has been, “Hey, I'm just going to dump a ton of riprap here, and I'm going to armor this bank and move on. You know, so the fun fact there that I've seen happen is either one, you get environmental groups or even state groups involved who are like, “Hey, riprap's not natural around here. That bank doesn't look natural. You're not doing that mitigation,” which can create a challenge for the operator. Um, or alternatively, alternatively, if not properly done, you can literally change the course of the waterway. So I worked with one operator who they did that, and they literally moved the problem about a hundred yards downstream. So it's like the bank didn't meander there anymore, just moved a hundred yard downstream and meandered. 35:41 Fernando: Yeah, I've seen instances of that too, I guess. And it becomes difficult to mitigate something. You're trying to reduce as much consequence or the likelihood of it happening. And again, I think you have to have a pretty good understanding of how you want to manage your risk as a corporation before like getting into those discussions or like being aligned with the actual risks of doing those things because yeah, HDD sound fine but like there is quite a risk into hot tapping a line if that's what it's going to take to get it through there. Or potentially you're shutting down natural gas supply or something to, you know, a community, right? To do this for a while during winter or something to that nature. So there's a lot of things that could go, I think, in pipelines in general. 36:30 Christopher: Yeah, cost benefit always finds its way into the discussion, right? It always does. And those can be challenging. And so oftentimes it kind of makes you wonder If we use this role as an integrity professional, what role is appropriate to have on the cost side, right? Here's the challenge. We have a technical approach. We say here's option one, which is prevention. Here's option two, mitigation. And then does it move on? And then we deal with the consequences later as the integrity professional, or do we want to be involved in those conversations? 37:07 Rhett: I'm going to ask one last question of you. I'm curious what your thoughts are. So this is you personally. How much of this if it's an operator starting with a normal size integrity program—and you've worked for a couple now, so you've got to feel for what an integrity program might look like—how much of this can an operator realistically take on themselves, and how much do you think most operators are going to have reach out to, you know, experts and consultants as they launch the program? 37:35 Christopher: Here's your chance, buddy. Say it one more time. 37:37 Fernando: So— 37:38 Rhett: It organizationally depends. 37:38 Fernando: I do think that it's organizationally dependent because realistically, I do think it's organizationally dependent though. And here's the thing. I think that some people in some organizations, um, are going to be really good at what will become an open -ended problem. But soon as you start looking into it, there's actually quite a bit of people and expertise. So, you can leverage consultants to help guide you, but maybe you have the resources available to do a lot of it in-house. Realistically, I do think you have to leverage experts to help guide you. So geotechnical experts, experts for pipeline integrity, and also potentially experts in things that are, you know, to me, more abstract, right? So like, what happens with water as it's transporting across these streams is something that I don't fully understand. And I know I'm not going to try to find somebody, you know, within my local organization to do that, it's a lot easier to rely on somebody who's made a career out of understanding how water is going through channels, right? So it just kind of depends. And I do think it's quite necessary to ask for help. 38:49 Rhett: Yeah, that's cool, I was just curious, because you know, again, as an operator is trying to start up a program, I mean, there's some of it, I look at it from the outside and I think, okay, an inventory, you could probably work with somebody to set up a program to build an inventory and then maybe eventually take on the management of that. The assessment, I think there's a lot of tools that you can use from an assessment or identification side, where an operator, again, once they get familiar with it, probably not as a first step, but they can probably get familiar with doing some of those assessments, not all of them. Mitigation is one where I don't, that becomes very tough, right? Especially if you want to actually beyond an HDD, if you want to do something other than an HDD mitigation can get, I think really challenging, particularly if you get into environmental aspects of mitigation, um, for sure. So, I was just curious, you know, if that's something that as an operator looks at this as, “Hey, is this going to be always a bolt on cost of my program,” or their elements that they should expect to begin to get comfortable long-term bringing in underneath their own purview. 39:41 Fernando: I think the most people though, I think most operators when starting from scratch are going to have to rely a lot on contractors and probably for the long term because realistically some of that is very niche and it doesn't get used a lot, right? So you're talking about very complex mitigations. You may have two of those in a 10-year span. And yeah, everybody involved in that project will become experts and we'll know about it. But I can guarantee you that that's not going to be like a widespread organizational thing potentially for that company, right? So there are experts that potentially got built, but then you're still going to rely on somebody who is doing it all the time because that's their job, right? Like a geotechnical person that helps with those. 40:24 Christopher: Any hot takes? 40:27 Fernando: Many, many hot takes. 40:30 Christopher: Offline 40:31 Fernando: Offline, next question. 40:34 Rhett: Fernando, I want to say thanks for taking the time to join us, really appreciate it. It's always great to see you. On average, before you go, I just want ask, if you were going to the airport to travel internationally, how long would you recommend that you get to the airport in advance of your flight? 40:47 Fernando: So, depending, it's an organizationally dependent thing, you see, Bush Airport is very different from Hobby, is the thing. 41:00 Rhett: Thank you so much. To our audience, we really enjoyed talking about this and again I, um, thanks to the suggestions out there for tackling this this topic. We appreciate your insight, Fernando, and the time that you spent with us. We'll be back in a couple of weeks on pipeline things. It's great to be with you guys. 41:19 Rhett: This episode of Pipeline Things was executively produced by Sarah Etier. Thanks to Fernando Curiel from ExxonMobil for joining us and for ExxonMobil for allowing us to use their facilities. And of course, always recognition to my co-host, Christopher De Leon. This episode was not written by me. Instead, it was shot on the spot with no retakes.