Modernizing Gas Leak Survey - Part 1

[TomDeWitte]

现代化的气体泄漏调查——的一部分1

By Tom DeWitte and Tom Coolidge

The prospect of natural gas escaping containment within the pipe network it is to be flowing is one of those things that can keep a gas utility executive up at night – for good reason. Leaks are a safety issue with the potential to harm people, property, and the environment. Detecting leaks quickly is a key to restoring the integrity of the pipe network and returning operations to their usual safe and reliable state.

For this reason, every natural gas pipe in the United States and Canada is required to be surveyed for leaks at regulator intervals. Accomplishing this requirement requires gas organization staff to traverse 2.6 million miles (4,184,000 kilometers) in the United States and 368,000 miles (592,000 kilometers) of pipe in Canada. Most of this pipe is inspected by staff who walk while carrying special equipment to detect leaking natural gas. Walking at a pace of 3 miles per hour would require 989,333 hours of walking to inspect all the natural gas pipes in both countries. That works out to 123,667 working days walking for 8 hours each day.

These numbers are crazy huge and require significant manpower and equipment to accomplish this required task. For a gas organization, this means consuming a non-trivial amount of scarce Operations and Maintenance (O&M) dollars. Any improvement in improving the efficiency and speed at which an organization can accomplish this required task can quickly add-up to significant savings of O&M dollars. And, importantly, contribute to a safety track record that aids the organization’s customer satisfaction, regulatory compliance, reputation, and brand value.

In this blog series, we will look at the top traits of a modern Leak Survey program. In this first part, we focus on improving efficiency and lowering O&M costs. This will be followed by additional articles which will focus on improving auditability, IT administration, and data management.

1 - Keep Crews Moving

Let’s start with a simple premise about the efficiency at which a field technician can perform a Leak Survey.

Anything that requires the field technician to cease movement (walking or driving) increases cost.

For many gas organizations, the Leak Survey process is a paper and marker process. In the paper process the field technician uses a marker to highlight on the paper map of the pipe system, those pipe segments which were traversed. This means having to stop moving, pull out the marker, and then mark on the paper map the street or neighborhood of the pipe system just completed. Have every technician repeat this small activity several times an hour over the workday, repeating every workday spent performing leak survey, and very quickly this small little delay adds up to considerable time and becomes a significant increase to the company’s budget.

如果技术人员有一个移动phone or tablet with the ArcGIS Field Maps app installed? Then with the ArcGIS Tracking capability that is now built into the ArcGIS Field Maps mobile application, the software could be documenting every few seconds the location, date/time, and username of the field technician. The technician no longer needs to stop to mark or denote what portion of the pipe system was just traversed. Keeping the technician moving, improves efficiency and reduces costs.

2 – Be Smart When Using Smart Devices

Today’s smart devices are amazing little computing devices. With the ArcGIS Field Maps mobile application, these smart devices know who I am, where I am, and the local date and time. This system knowledge when applied to Leak Survey improves the efficiency of the field technician. The recent enhancement of Attribute Rules to ArcGIS allows for this this information to be automatically written to the Leak Survey record.

Why ask the field technician to stop moving and spend time documenting what the ArcGIS Field Maps application on the smart device already knows?

No longer does the field technician need to enter the date and time when they started the leak survey area. The ArcGIS Field Maps application knows this time. When the user changes the leak survey status to: In Progress, the application automatically populates the start date and time to the leak survey record. Nor does the field technician need to enter the date and time when the leak survey area is completed. The application knows this time, which is when the user denotes the leak survey status as: Completed. The application also automatically documents to the leak survey record the username of the field technician when the survey status is completed.

Being able to leverage the smarts of the smart device allows the field technician to keep moving, and complete the Leak Survey in less time.

3 - Avoid Duplication of Surveys

A common frustration for many leak survey programs is when one technician surveys the same section of the pipe system that was recently surveyed by another technician. The core cause of this issue and the wasteful costs it incurs is an inability to share information across the team in real time.

There is nothing more frustrating than finding out your team did the same task twice.

ArcGIS Field Maps helps the team to avoid duplication of surveys by sharing the information collected by one field technician to all team members. As soon as one technician marks the leak survey area as completed, every other team member will see their maps update with a newly color-coded map showing the leak survey area as completed.

This includes sharing in near real-time information about identified issues and identified gas leaks. As soon as one team member marks a gas meter as damaged or corroded, all team members will see that newly collected information.

4 - Streamline IT Data Administration

另一个常常被忽视的成本是成本the IT department will incur maintaining this compliance information. Many legacy solutions required extensive effort and cost to prepare the information for the next Leak Survey interval. This may be the cost to print thousands of paper maps which will be used by the leak survey field technicians. It may also be the cost to prepare the data in a digital leak survey system.

Applying the attribute rule capabilities of ArcGIS to this problem has nearly eliminated the need for prepping of the information.

With the current capabilities of ArcGIS, the updating of the next inspection date and next compliance dates are performed immediately by the software when the leak survey area is designated as completed. No longer is this a post-processing task for IT to initiate and monitor.

5 - Improve Management of Leak Survey History

A key part of minimizing the cost of IT administration of leak survey is the elimination of the need to archive the leak survey data for future regulatory audits. Gone are the days of the GIS or IT administrator working on New Year’s Eve to copy out the current year’s leak survey data and reset the leak survey areas in preparation for next year.

Now, a leak survey record is immediately archived to the Leak Survey History table as soon as the status is set to: Completed. Applying better management methods to the leak survey history, not only reduces administration costs, it also provides easier and more intuitive access to a leak survey’s history during a regulatory audit.

Given the thousands of miles of natural gas pipe that individual gas organizations are required to survey, any improvement to the efficiency of the program can quickly add up to significant reduction of O&M costs. ArcGIS Field Maps on a smart device provides these efficiencies to keep the field technician moving.

This blog article is the first of a series of four blogs articles explaining how recent enhancements to Esri’s ArcGIS system can be utilized to improve the Leak Survey process. In this Part 1, we’ve covered five of the top ten traits of modernized leak survey that the whole blog series will cover. Future blogs in this series will go into greater detail on how these enhancements to ArcGIS can be configured to achieve the described efficiencies.

PLEASE NOTE: The postings on this site are our own and don’t necessarily represent Esri’s position, strategies, or opinions.