Working shoulder to shoulder, with TDW

Hello, and welcome back to the World Pipelines podcast, a podcast series for pipeliners featuring short, insightful interviews with people in the oil and gas industry. I'm your host, Elizabeth Corner. And in this season of the podcast, we are talking about membership associations for the pipeline sector. Throughout the series, we're exploring exactly what these associations do to move the midstream sector forwards and to support pipeliners all over the world.

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In this episode, I am very pleased to welcome Matt Romney, who is pipeline integrity product line director at TD Williamson, our sponsor for this season of the podcast. We happen to be catching up at the pipeline technology conference, the PTC in Berlin. So thank you, Matt. I really appreciate you taking your time out of the conference and the exhibition to chat to me, so welcome.

Well, thank you. Appreciate that.

Tealie Willinson, a well established leader in pipeline integrity and maintenance. Let's start off by talking about how does the company engage with industry membership organisations? And perhaps you can tell us what made sponsoring this season of the podcast of interest to you.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, so one of the things that's important to TDW is focusing on how do we help operators keep the product in the pipeline safely and effectively. As we understood that this was going to be a focus of the podcast in this season, we really wanted to join and talk about that. Know, we believe that the industry, especially membership organizations, play a vital role in helping operators, in our case ILI vendors and contractors throughout the industry come together and have meaningful conversations around the threats and the challenges that we all see each day. And we find that as we actively participate in these organisations, we get the most out of it and so does the industry.

That leads me onto my next question. I wonder what value you place on the membership organisations and what kind of value they bring to you in terms of things like innovation, collaboration, even things like industry standards?

Oh, excellent question. So yeah, there are a number of different membership organizations. There are certainly organizations that focus on research and we find that those organizations do a phenomenal job of identifying potential new technologies, doing early testing. There are organizations that certainly focus on the industry standards and we find that as we participate and engage with the operators and then with those organizations, we're able again to have that meaningful conversation, to find ways to work together to ultimately maintain the integrity of pipelines.

Fantastic. You're all working towards the same end

goal. Absolutely.

And maybe you can share with us some specific examples of how TDW has benefited from working with associations and maybe name a few that you do work with.

Yeah, yeah. So we work quite a bit with PRCI. There's been a number of projects that they've done over the years. I'll name a couple that have been more recent. So one of the challenges that the industry is certainly facing is around selective seam weld corrosion and PRCI facilitated a project in which they were able to identify different aspects of it.

Great. I love that focus on a real technical focus that you can draw out with your work. And does TDW contribute to research or best practice or knowledge sharing within those organisations?

Absolutely. Yeah, I would say in general, there's two ways that we'll collaborate or contribute. Certainly on the research side, whether there's a joint industry project or something like that, we'll provide support as far as funding or even sometimes an ILI tool to support that initiative. Outside of that, certainly technical expertise, so thought leadership. We have a number of members or different committees that are working on collaboration and standards like that.

And when we talk about safety, how does TDW work with membership groups when we're thinking about advancing safety and efficiency?

Yeah, so safety is always important and one of the things, one of the benefits that I see at least in the pipeline industry is that there really is a lot of collaboration and thought, know, the leadership, thought leadership, the sharing of information across organizations, you know, so it's not uncommon for, for me or, or even my competitors to be working shoulder and shoulder on talking about how do we do this better? How do we help operators and operators sharing information with us? Here's what our concerns are. Here's what is my challenge today. Though that forum that these industry organizations kind of sponsor provides that landscape to have those meaningful conversations.

Yeah. Many organisations focus on mentorship and developing a workforce and looking after the personnel. Does TDW engage with those sorts of efforts to help attract and train people? We know that's a challenge in the industry. Is there anything you can tell me about that?

Yeah. Yeah. There there are. We were an early adopter of something called the engineering development program. We don't have that program in the same strength we did originally, but it was a mentorship program internal to TDW, which we bring young engineers in and help them experience, provide them an experience in different parts of the organization.

Great, who's that?

Jonathan Hart.

Jonathan, great. Yeah, I've spoken to them for this podcast, they are doing some great work. So let's move on to my next question. How does TDW stay ahead of emerging challenges and technologies in the industry? We're here at PTC, so you must have been having some interesting conversations this week. Do membership organizations play a role in that process?

Absolutely they do. So it can be challenging, There's always that new and emerging challenge. Certainly the industry organizations, they play a role as far as just facilitating that conversation. The research organizations sometimes they'll do some early research and identify, Hey, these are technologies that look promising. Typically we'll work within those organizations to grow an idea, at which point then we'll take it in house and do a lot of testing, a lot of working on implementing and then typically we'll work more hand in hand with a specific operator to mature that idea.

Right, so then you take it in house and then you run with it from there.

You run with it from there. Yeah.

And what in your view are some of the biggest challenges facing the midstream sector today? How is TDW addressing those?

Yeah, so for a while what we've been seeing is that the threats that face pipeline operators are becoming more complex. We typically will call them the interacting threats. It's typically multiple threats that are coincident on the same pipe, black space that maybe because the two of them are coincident is actually a greater threat. So a dent with metal loss. Today we see a lot of operators that are facing challenges around circumferential stress corrosion cracking.

And how do you see the role of industry associations evolving? So you partner with them, how do you imagine that you're going to continue engaging with them?

It's going to be engagement, that's just it. I think we will continue to see that the threats will become more complex. The industry organizations play a critical role in helping identify those threats by asking the hard questions, right? And so I think that's the role that they'll continue to play is really facilitate the conversation, ask the hard question and drive the industry to find solutions for them.

Yeah. And to finish off, I want to talk about what's next for TDW in terms of upcoming initiatives, technologies, you know, what are the conversations that you're having this week, for example, that get you excited about the future?

Great. I appreciate the question. Yeah. So we're, we're actually in the process, at least on the pipeline integrity side, we're in the process of rolling out something we call ultra res MFL. So we've had our MDS Pro, advanced ILI technology for quite some time. It's time to make an update. And so we we've made an update. We've nearly doubled the number of MFL sensors on that tool.

Great.

And so that's being rolled out now and we're really excited, we've had a number of opportunities with operators. From there, we're going to have new and exciting data, more resolution, clearer picture of what's going on in the pipeline. It'll be wonderful to then use that to enhance our offerings, really look at the mechanical damage, the circumferential stress, corrosion cracking, hard spots like the seam weld, all of those very complex features and look at how that increased sensor resolution adds to the value we can deliver to operators.

Great. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. We appreciate your sponsorship and we appreciate your continued support. Thank you.

Appreciate the time. Thanks a lot. Thanks.

My thanks to Matt Romney at TDW for giving us a technology provider's perspective on the benefits of working with membership organizations to advance understanding and research and to support safety and efficiency. Thanks for listening to the World Pipelines podcast. Subscribe for free wherever you get your podcasts. If you have enjoyed this episode, please rate and review and forward to a colleague or friends.

The World Pipelines podcast is brought to you by TD Williamson. The smart plug inline isolation system from TD Williamson delivers with double independent energized seals. Ready to upgrade your next project? Visit tdw.redsmartplug to learn more.