At a recent industry breakfast, a panel of speakers from Embridge, TerraFina, Plains All American, and the Bauer College of Business discussed their perspectives on both the boom and the coming challenges for the midstream sector. With the introduction of fracking and horizontal drilling, production has increased beyond the transportation infrastructure’s ability to move those hydrocarbons to factories and the market. And with the market flooded with natural gas, both Plains All American and Terrafina are pushing to export. All of this remains good news for the Midstream, because even the best condensates aren’t worth anything if you can’t get them to market.
As noted by Enbridge’s President ‘safety and integrity are critical driving factors’ – for a multitude of reasons. In fact, the Dean of the Bauer School of Business stated that 34 million man hours per year are being spent in the Midstream sector, just on maintaining regulatory compliance in a world of ever-changing standards. And risk management is not driven only by human safety implications, a ruptured joint of pipe also slows time to market and gouges revenue.
At Entrance, we are well positioned to provide intelligence and visibility that will make compliance headaches and safety worries far more manageable. Based on our experience, most of the 34 million hours spent on compliance are probably spent tracking down information rather than making key decisions and taking preventative action. Tracking joints of pipe from the mill to the ground and creating a history of each joint’s various statuses can mean many an hour of work saved when a pipeline’s status needs to be reported on. In fact, SpreadBoss, our ongoing project with TG Mercer, is solving just that problem (and a few others to boot!). Check out the article about our application in the May 2012 issue of Pipeline and Gas Journal!