Unlocking the Power of GIS in the Pipeline Industry with Jeff Allen

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This episode of the Energy Pipeline is sponsored by Caterpillar Oil and gas. Since the 1930s, Caterpillar has manufactured engines for drilling, production, well service and gas compression. With more than 2,100 dealer locations worldwide, Caterpillar offers customers a dedicated support team to assist with their premier power solutions.

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Welcome to the Energy Pipeline Podcast with your host, KC Yost. Tune in each week to learn more about industry issues, tools and resources to streamline and modernize the future of the industry. Whether you work in oil and gas or bring a unique perspective, this podcast is your knowledge transfer hub. Welcome to the Energy Pipeline.

00:00:49 KC Yost

Hello everyone, and welcome to this episode of the Energy Pipeline Podcast. Today we'll be discussing all things GIs with our guest, Jeff Allen, Global Pipeline practice manager at Esri, the builder of ArcGIS, the world's leading GIS software. So, hey Jeff, welcome to the Energy Pipeline Podcast.

00:01:10 Jeff Allen

KC, thank you for inviting me. Happy to be here.

00:01:14 KC Yost

Looking forward to the conversation. So, before we get into that though, I want to make sure that I give a shout out to our dear friend Monique Roberts, executive Director of the PODS association, who introduced us. So thanks, Monique. Thanks very much. You want to shout out to her?

00:01:32 Jeff Allen

Excellent. Yeah, Bodique's a special friend and a great advocate for the pipeline industry and GIS in general, and happy to have her as the executive Director of PODS for sure.

00:01:42 KC Yost

Absolutely. She comes from a long line of pipeliners. I knew her dad quite well for the years that he was around. In any case, we'll get on to the topic. Let's talk about you, if you would take a few minutes to share your background with our listeners. I understand you went to the University of Maine.

00:02:01 Jeff Allen

I did, actually. And I started out wanting to be an engineer. And at first I thought I wanted to be an electrical engineer and quickly realized that electrical engineering wasn't really for me, but I still wanted to be an engineer. And so I went around to all the different engineering practices at UMaine and University of Maine had a very unique program. It was called Surveying Engineering. And these guys were doing some really cool stuff. They were doing regular boundary surveying and photogrammetry and GPS and gis. And I thought, wow, this really sounds something that I could get excited about and fell into that program and that's where I learned some of the background and the technologies that I still deploy today in my everyday work. So more recently, people would call that geomatic engineering or surveying engineering, but it's really the science of measurement and MA of the earth, and it's really fun.

00:03:02 KC Yost

Excellent, excellent, excellent. And Your career?

00:03:06 Jeff Allen

Yeah. So after I graduated from University of Maine, I hooked up with an engineering company just outside of Boston. I grew up in the Northeast and so kind of going back home.

00:03:17 KC Yost

Go shops.
                

00:03:19 Jeff Allen

Yeah, exactly. All the Boston teams are my faves. And this engineering company also the president was also a graduate University of Maine. And they were doing some really cool stuff in this, in this area of geomatics and high precision survey and really kind of cutting edge stuff. And they were doing a bunch of pipeline work and, and, and in that project they were like, hey, can you help us do this faster, better, cheaper right? Now these guys go in the field and they write everything in a paper notebook and they send it off to Houston and somebody puts it into AutoCAD. And you know, we've got all this expansion work going on. You can we automate this in the field? And I said, what do I know? Sure. And so started writing some software and built this whole process for helping automate the as built data collection for new pipelines for Tennessee Gas and their Northeast expansion. And that was really kind of the launching board for the rest of my career and fell in love with the pipeline industry and the people and the process and sort of just kind of built a career on that.

00:04:24 KC Yost

Excellent, excellent. And now you're with esri?

00:04:28 Jeff Allen

I did. So I went from being a survey, you know, holding the end of a survey rod to a partner in that company over the course of 20, 25 years. And we transitioned that from the original owners. And I hung around for a little while and decided, hey, I need a second job I guess in my lifetime. And had worked with the team at ESRI and the pipeline team and sort of called them up and said, hey, would you guys like a pipeline expert on your team? They said, absolutely, come on over and so transitioned over to ESRI to be the sort of oversee and be the subject matter expert for all things pipeline globally for ESRI at this point. And so it gets me to see a lot of different places in the world and talk to a lot of different interesting people about how to automate and manage pipeline data in a gis.

00:05:16 KC Yost

Very cool, very cool. Can you do an elevator speech for Ezriel?

00:05:22 Jeff Allen

Absolutely. So ESRI is probably one of the largest privately owned software companies in the world, really specializing in this science of location of where and we actually call it that. Right. So the tools and technologies and process of how we take information that's located somewhere in the world, put it into a system so we can visualize it, manage it, analyze it, collect it and do something useful with it. Right. And that transcends any industry you can think of, right? From health care to national government to local government, to pipelines to oil and gas. You know, across the gamut we do this and, and you know, we kind of specialize in these different verticals. So we can, we can bring very configurable solutions to a certain industry as they need. And we do that pretty much worldwide. We are the global leader in that space.

00:06:16 KC Yost

I gotcha. Very good. Yes, I've, I've known of the company forever, it seems like, or at least in my most recent past, but very good, very good. And, and I mentioned Pods Association. Do you have a little elevator speech for the Pods Association? Understand, I'm going to compare this to the elevator speech that Monique gave, so go right ahead.

00:06:37 Jeff Allen

Absolutely. So. So PODS actually stands for the pipeline Open Data standard. You can imagine when we started thinking about building these GIS systems for pipeline companies, there was a lot of really smart people sitting around a lot of different boardrooms with whiteboards saying, okay, what do we need to put into these systems? Pipe, obviously, and valves and fittings and what are all the attributes for a pipe and what are all the things that we need to do to describe a valve? And everybody was doing this in parallel and really pods, the generic organization around pods was, hey, let's get all these people in the same room and come up with a standard for the industry. So whether you were Tennessee Gas or you were Enbridge or you were another pipeline company, you weren't starting from square one. You were starting something that we all kind of agreed to as a core. Now every business has their own flavor of pods and different unique things that they're trying to manage. But we all agreed on some kind of core. And the idea here is that eventually if we can all have something that's similar, then we can have interoperability. You sell a pipeline to me, I can take your data and easily move it into my system. If I wanted to buy a tool for class or hca, they're substandard and we're not reinventing the wheel. That's really what the operators were around, is not having these one off solutions. Then the vendor community was around it because we wanted to build solutions on top of this template that we could then market to that energy industry.

00:08:14 KC Yost

And I understand you've got the regulatory environment, if you will, involved in pods as well to make it a little bit easier for them to reference when they're doing audits and going into different operating companies.

00:08:30 Jeff Allen

So you can imagine once we figured out the physical assets that needed to go into the database, then we started seeing all these regulatory rules come into effect. This is really key for gis growing up in the pipeline industry because initially we were thinking this as a mapping tool and now it's really being viewed as an integrity management compliance auditory tool. Anytime a new regulation comes in, we think, okay, what do we need to put into the PODS database to meet this new requirement? That's all. Get around the table and agree on that. And then we start populating with data that's kind of the rinse and repeat process of how we build and expand on pods as the industry needs change over time.

00:09:16 KC Yost

Outstanding. Outstanding. You've mentioned Tennessee Gas Pipeline twice. So a little bit of my history. I started with Tennessee gas in the mid-70s and worked there for a number of years. And I worked as a tail chainman and learned quickly that I wanted to be the head chainman on this 200 foot chain because I didn't like. I'd much rather stir up the rattlesnake nests in South Texas than to be the guy wearing the chaps to try and not get too poisoned or bit with the snakes as you go back through the nest. And then, then I graduated and went into the drafting group and did some mapping. And, and I will tell you that the manager of the department looked at some drawings that I did there and he was, he was quite nice about the, who said, casey, I'm here to compliment you on your lining. And don't worry about the lettering, we'll get the secretary to type all of this out and sticky back and, and put it on the drawings because your lettering is terrible. So that's, that's where I started almost 50 years ago and to see where you guys have advanced just over the years. Oh, I also mentioned that the first CAD equipment that we had at Tennessee Gas Pipeline, I think it was 1977, were two 10 foot by 10 foot cubicles encased in glass with their own air conditioning. And we called them the fishbowl because guys would go in there and they'd sit down. Of course, people would walk around saying, hey, this is a new thing, let's take a look at this. This is fantastic. But a drawing that we would generate in 30, 35, 40 hours was taking them 70, 75, 80 hours to generate. And I'm thinking, well, what's the efficiency here? You know, Little did I know what was in store with people like you in the background coming up with these really cool ideas to take the field stuff and turn it into the electronic stuff to generate. So anyway, that's my background. So with. With that being said, can we start at the big end of the funnel in this GIS discussion? And maybe you just tell me, what does GIS mean? What does it do? Can you. Can we start there with a definition of gis?

00:11:47 Jeff Allen

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it ties back very, very squarely to your story about alignment sheets, because the very first GIS systems that we built were actually to take data from these alignment sheets, put it into some type of organized system to then turn around and regenerate alignment sheets. It was an automated mapping facilities management program, and that was the very start of that. But in a sense, what we were missing in that CAD world is we had a lot of digital data, but we didn't have a lot of digital information. So if somebody wanted to say, hey, tell me where all the valves that are within 100ft of this type of river crossing and this type of material? You would have to literally have an engineer sit there and page through hundreds of pages, if not thousands of pages of alignment sheets to figure out where that is.

00:12:42 KC Yost

I think I resemble that remark. Go ahead.

00:12:45 Jeff Allen

The idea behind a GIS is, hey, what if we had this all in a database and more importantly, a spatial database? And then we could query that database and say, hey, tell me where all these things are and show me where they are and analyze it. So it's this idea that we have data that's spatially located and that we can compare two different data sets together that have nothing in common other than geography, and then make informed decisions from those types of queries that can help run the business, help find integrity management issues, help find cost savings, right? So we say, everybody thinks, oh, this is really cool stuff because look at how great these maps are. And I can zoom around like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But don't forget the main point here. We're trying to make the business more efficient, trying to drive decision making and make better decisions based on good data. And that's where this all started from, is really kind of building these databases. Because once we had that data in the GIS, the very first systems, what happened is the integrity management and the compliance guys came along and said, well, wait a second. All the information I'm searching for in my Excel files and paper files and on these drawings is in this database. And I can query them and I can create reports and I can file with the dot all the things I'll need to do. Well, hey, I want to be Your first consumer of this data from gis.

00:14:11 KC Yost

Perfect.

00:14:13 Jeff Allen

Then they became huge. We saw those first GIS implementations being with that integrity management flair to them. And now we do it across the organization. Operations, environmental compliance, even people that run the business run that. And I often tell my customers, can you imagine a day in the office without Outlook, without your email? Or could you imagine a day in the office where you couldn't see a map of where things were? We take that for granted because it's part of our day to day. I can go to Starbucks, I can navigate to Starbucks. Somebody would say, hey, why can't I navigate to the nearest mainline valve? That was the second big kind of influx of gis. We call it the consumerization of gis. When people came from home and said, hey, I have this technology on my iPhone. Why don't we have it here in the corporation? And that was the next big uptick of this GIS technology. So we don't see the iPhone and Google Maps as a competitor. In a sense it helped us. We are a business face solution. We're not a consumer based solution. We're helping large corporations do things more effectively. And people now understand the power of a map, even if they don't understand that it's really a GIS running that in the background.

00:15:36 KC Yost

Sure. The, the map is just a visual guide to the information system, right? Correct. Fair enough.

00:15:45 Jeff Allen

Do anything? Yeah. Right. The GIS does the things, does the verbs, the map. I don't know.

00:15:51 KC Yost

35 years ago or 40 years ago, someone explained, explained to me GIS was a way that I could go in one source to find information on a particular valve or meter station in lieu of going to the 13th floor to pull out the drawings and then go down to the 10th floor to operations to pull out the information on the inspections. And last time the Daniel Senior fitting had been inspected and that type of thing because it was all all right there together. Fair.

00:16:32 Jeff Allen

Exactly. And the next evolution of GIS is that it is now fully integrated with other business systems within the organization. So it doesn't sit as an island of data. But in fact I can visualize SCADA readings coming from my SCADA system or I can pull information, financial information from say SAP and work orders and time and schedules and see that in the GIS as well. So we say in the end of the day, if we do nothing, we manage the where the location of things and that location of things sits in our system and then we can connect to all this other business data. Now we tend to have a lot of business data in GIS as well. But that's what we really do really well is the where and then the analysis of that where.

00:17:21 KC Yost

So I get this data center and having it evolved and having as built information. But doesn't this continue over to, let's say, route optimization? I mean I, I envisioned again, back in the 70s, we used to have USGS quad sheets maps.

00:17:44 Jeff Allen

Absolutely.

00:17:44 KC Yost

That we would fold back the edge and we would splice them together with tape. And then depending on how big they are, they'd either be on the desk or we'd pin them on a wall. Again, Tennessee Gas had nice walls there, acoustic walls that we could put stick pins in. And you know, we'd have 50 miles of pipeline there. And then we would take a string and put a pin where we wanted to start the pipeline and string it up to where we wanted to end the pipeline. Pop that. And then we would try to find a route that would stay as close to that as possible. Now GIS has taken that to another level, hasn't it?

00:18:30 Jeff Allen

Yeah. So this is the other interesting part is that now we can collaborate across organizations. And so you remember the days where we had to, we had to go and sometimes we'd actually go to the map store and buy the quad maps, right?

00:18:46 KC Yost

Oh, we had a guy. We had a guy. We had a guy whose job it was to have seven and a half minute quads for every single area along the Tennessee gas pipeline line from South Texas all the way up to New York state. And we had a guy, he had three of every quad map. And when we get one, he'd order another one. I mean, we had a guy. Sorry, we had a guy.

00:19:18 Jeff Allen

Exactly. So that guy, where he used to go, is what we now call the living atlas. So ESRI curates a living atlas of all these other data layers, including the quads, including the historical quad maps, all stitched together in georeference. So now when I'm planning a pipeline route, instead of sitting on the big layout table and folding the corners, I have this huge treasure of information that I can bring in about soil characteristics, land use ownership, the quad map data, elevation sources. Now what I can do is instead of picking this least cost path, by just looking at what's on the quad map, I can actually ask the GIS system, hey, show me the least cost route, or show me a couple of options for these cost route using all these different data layers and algorithms. And now we're starting to think about show me the least risk route. Like if I'm planning A high impact pipeline. And it's going through an area that I know I'm going to have to maintain over time. I want to know where their least risk is for that pipeline versus the least cost of construction. Because I'm looking at the bigger picture over time now. So we've taken GIS and we've driven it backwards from the sort of day to day management of the pipeline back to the initial design. Now there's still a point in the middle where we hit the engineering design. Right. We're not going to do an HDD crossing design in gis. That's not the tool for that. Right, right. But now we can share the plan with gis, with Autodesk. We have an integration with Autodesk. Autodesk engineers do their design and we can take that design and load it back into GIS when it's finished. And so we have this digital handoff now from the original route to when it goes in service. And then we manage that asset till its retirement some X years later. Right. And the idea here is we have a single source of truth. They were not duplicating data and making copies of data. Because you know, as we did those projects, it would be the 11th hour and you'd get the, you know, the environmental guys would send in their report. You'd be like, hey, what about this wetland?

00:21:44 KC Yost

Right?

00:21:45 Jeff Allen

And they're like, oh, the pipe doesn't go through that wetland. They go, yeah, but we changed the route last week. Oh, nobody told us. Yeah, right. And so, so now we have a single database where everybody's working off the same sheet of music. They might be in four different companies, but now we know this is the current design. This is where your environmental report should be based off of Engineering based their design off of this arc. Guys, you're going off of that line and that's how we bring it all together. Right. And that's. That really makes that whole process much more smooth.

00:22:17 KC Yost

The single greatest way to have a successful project in completion is to make sure that you have good lines of communication.

00:22:27 Jeff Allen

Absolutely.

00:22:28 KC Yost

And if you've got this as a one stop shop, it works out extremely, extremely well. So summarize for me, what are the 3, 4 basic large benefits of GIS? What have you brought to the table for the energy industry?

00:22:49 Jeff Allen

You know, certainly an understanding of what you own, where it's at and how to access that information for operations. Right. Those. That's kind of just a key tenant of running a business. If you don't know where things are at and you don't know what you own and you don't know where your inventory is. How do you, how do you actually run a successful business? Right. So in this, in this point, it's.

00:23:12 KC Yost

Almost a must to have in this day and time. You can't shrug your shoulders.

00:23:18 Jeff Allen

Correct.

00:23:19 KC Yost

And say, I don't know.

00:23:21 Jeff Allen

Yeah, I often, I often sort of refer to it like people say, you know, how do I know? How do you know when there's kind of going to be trouble in an audit? And I said, you know, when you're sitting in the conference room and the auditors ask a question and behind the glass you see people kind of running around trying to figure out where that data is. Right. And you know that that's sort of the sniff test of there's going to be a problem. And, and now we go into these audits and the auditor says, hey, show me, you know, this crossing that you did this inspection. Quick query the system. Up it comes. Hey, okay, you guys are on your, on the money, right? What, what you said in your operations manual matches your data, right? Go to this area and show me this high consequence area. How did you determine it? And when another query comes right up, about five or six of those. Okay, let's, let's move on to something else. Right?

00:24:10 KC Yost

Right.

00:24:11 Jeff Allen

Clearly know your system, you know how it's operating, you know the safe operating conditions. And, and now what we're trying to really focus on is those advanced analytics. Right? So, so not only just putting the data in the database and visualizing it getting out in the field to do reporting, but now, hey, you know, what is the, you know, we always say, we're here to keep the hydrocarbons inside the steel. If I could take all this data and put it together and say, hey, this is the most likely place where we're going to have a failure, we need to identify that and fix that problem today. That's the holy grail. Never have another pipeline accident because there's something in the data we don't know about. That's what we come to work every day to do, is to do that, to keep those hydrocarbons in the steel, keep that operating system safe for the public, and, and continue to be the safest way to transport hydrocarbons around the country. Really.

00:25:10 KC Yost

Gotcha, Gotcha. Very good trends. There have been a lot of trends in GIS for energy. You and I talked before the podcast and you said something about Digital Twins. Can you talk about some of the innovative trends in GIS for energy?

00:25:31 Jeff Allen

Yeah. And Digital Twins is Is, is a kind of a, it's not a tricky subject, but it's a bit of a buzzword, right? Everybody and their brother has a digital twin. And at ESRI we kind of look back at what we've done and we say, well, we've kind of been doing digital twins forever. And, and where we think we set ourselves apart in, in this trend of digital twins is that we have digital twins not only the pipeline, but of the natural world as well. So for example, digital twin is really three things. It's the physical asset itself, physical data. It's some real time data that goes into it that makes it come alive, whether that's river flow conditions or population or pipe flows, some real time data over time, and then the ability to ask the system, what if in the future, right? So here's a good example. We had a pipeline customer that loaded all the historical weather data in their operating area, all their historical flow information, and then they created an algorithm that says, hey, if we're getting this type of weather system hitting the Midwest, when has that happened in the past, what have been the demands on the system when that happened? And now they're saying, hey, what if we line pack ahead of that winter storm instead of putting this instant demand on the pipeline on Tuesday because it's super cold in Minneapolis, we've already know this is going to happen. We can pre plan for that. That's the digital twin helping them determine the future outcome of that problem.

00:27:08 KC Yost

So do you have remote sensing technologies that tie in so that when that scenario starts to develop, AI kicks in and automatically starts or it asks to line pack.

00:27:23 Jeff Allen

So what we have is the technology that allows us to bring all that data together and analyze it in one place. And I often tell people location is the ultimate foreign key because there's nothing in the weather data set that says anything about pipelines. And the pipelines have no idea where the weather changes. But if I know where, then I can make that correlation and I can make that, and if I can bring the SCADA information in based on the location of the sensors along the lines, then I have that piece of information as well. And that's how that kind of all ties together. And this now flows into things like AI and predictive analysis and all the buzzwords you hear going around in that area. Those are all things that are being kind of put into the ESRI platform as well to help with that decision making process.

00:28:10 KC Yost

So if we find a situation where the wind turbines stop turning because it's too cold and there's snow covering up the solar panels and we need to pump some natural gas. The technology is there where things could be sensed enough that AI could say, hey, we need to start worrying about line pack because we're going to have a huge demand at this electric power plant so that two thirds of Texas doesn't freeze.

00:28:45 Jeff Allen

This is where we have digital twins talking to each other. Because the pipeline digital twin has no idea what's going on in the solar digital twin. The solar digital twin has nothing, no idea what's going on in the in the wind digital tour. But because they know where they're all at and I can overlay those digital twins together because they're not at 00, they're in real world space. Now I can start doing some really interesting modeling between systems. Or the other one I always say is there are systems out there doing predictive analysis of population growth. It had nothing to do with pipelines. They're trying to. City planners and all kinds of people are trying to figure out, hey, highways, where's the next growth Highways. Well, would it be nice if I was a pipeline operator and I knew that in four years this is going to be a Class 3 area and I'm going to build a pipeline there, right? So I want to take that information for that digital twin and I want to overlay it on my risk analysis and I want to say, hey, I know it's a class one today, but guess what, it's not going to be in five years. So let's either route around that or design the pipeline so we don't have to dig it up in 10 years time to change it out or change the valve spacing because the class location units have changed in that area. This idea of this information coming from different sources, not just what I maintain but all these other places. And Jack Dangerman ESRI calls it a system of systems that we can connect all these things together and geography helps us bind all these systems of systems together. Because if all this data exists on Excel spreadsheets, it ain't going to work. Like there's no way you can take a cell spreadsheet of wind turbines and things and line it up with the pipeline and get anything useful out of it. It's just data, right? That's the really trick about geography and GIS is it helps us make these connections between systems that might not be there in the inherent in the data itself.

00:30:42 KC Yost

So how far down the line is this going to happen? What are the future trends of the future of GIS in. In the energy industry or have we just talked about it? I mean, this is fascinating stuff.

00:30:58 Jeff Allen

Yeah, I think the next sort of, you know, people say, hey, do you ESRI have a 10 year roadmap? I was like, you know, it's hard. Technology changes so rapidly. And the example I give is five years ago, I'd walk into a pipeline customer and say, hey, you guys really need to think about cloud computing. And I would say to a company, they all looked me square in the eye and said, jeff, we're never going to put our pipeline data in the cloud. It's going to stay in that data center that we maintain behind our firewall. And I go, okay, fast forward three years. Every CIO is coming to us and say, hey, guess what? We're getting out of the data center business and we're going to put everything in these big data centers. So we're moving to the cloud. Right. And that's in the technology timeframe. That's a blink that that happened, you know. So for me to say with any straight face, I know what's going to happen even five or ten years from now, I don't know. I can tell you the trends right now. A lot of the trends are around sort of imagery. You know, we think about imagery not only, you know, you and I used to do it. First thing we saw was nape imagery.

00:32:02 KC Yost

Right.

00:32:03 Jeff Allen

Now, black and white imagery. This is so cool. And then it became color, right. Like, oh my goodness. And then it became, you know, Half centimeter or 1 meter pixel resolution. The currency of imagery today is time. And it's hard to explain to somebody, but when they look at an image and they put the pipeline on it, the first they ask is, when did that image, when was that image taken? Was it last week, last month or last year? Right. So with this advent of these smaller, more economical satellites and satellite providers being more efficient, we can get imagery around the pipeline. Today I have companies that you just point on a map and say, hey, shoot this for me tomorrow. As long as there's no cloud cover, you'll get an image the next day. Like, you know, like you used to see in the movies, right?

00:32:48 KC Yost

Sure.

00:32:48 Jeff Allen

This idea of this sort of more rapidly capturing of data, whether it be from imagery or real time or since, you know, we're thinking about in terms of time now. And then the other real thing that we're seeing is this idea of AI and everybody sort of AI is like holding on to an elephant. Like, what does AI mean to everybody? But what it means for me in the GIS space is that I can unlock capabilities to non GIS professionals. So what does that look like in practicality? Hey, computer, make me a map that has all the valve locations within 700ft about HCA and within a mile of this, right, in English language. And that gets translated into actual GIS code that runs and does that query for me right now, you have to be a GIS professional to do that, right? So we're trying to unlock those capabilities through AI so I can just natural language, ask the system for things that are very, very complicated and get that information back so I can make decisions in my job.

00:33:52 KC Yost

Two things that I've noticed. Number one, I'm a dinosaur and you guys are leaving me in the dust. And second, that technology is growing exponentially. It's like the old hockey stick analogy. It grows, starts off slow and then it takes off like a rocket. And here you guys are just developing things that I never would have dreamt of, sitting as a tail chainman down in the valley somewhere between Far and Corpus Christi, surveying across a bunch of cultivated fields. Things I never would have thought of. It's amazing what you guys are doing. Very impressive.

00:34:38 Jeff Allen

The interesting part of that is when I first showed up at the engineering company, I showed up with my laptop, wasn't even a laptop, with my computer under my arm, and I was writing software code and my boss said, put that computer down. You're going to go to the field for the summer and you're going to chain pipe and see how these things get made, right? See the welding, see the ditching, see all those things. And I will tell you, even today, that experience is invaluable because it helps me formulate how I use the technology to solve these problems, because I know the fundamentals of how this pipe was actually put in the ground and, and why we did things, why is stationing important and all these things. And so as much as we get caught up in these new technologies and new things, I often tell people, go to the field, drive in the truck. You will learn so much from that experience that'll help you in your technology career than you could ever think of otherwise.

00:35:41 KC Yost

We're doing a series of podcasts where engineering directors and vice presidents of Howard Energy Planes Resources, few other companies out there that have really done a great job taking the time and greatly appreciated and they, to a person, they talk about building that solid foundation. You've got to go out and kick the dirt and recognize what's going on. It's tough for you to tell someone to put a flange there. If you've never bolted a flange up up, it's, it's tough to do a survey unless you've been out there. Now no one does 200 foot chains anymore, but at least get out there and watch and see what's going on and build that foundation so that when you're in the office you can understand what's going on and what you're asking those people to do. And that's exactly what you're saying.

00:36:36 Jeff Allen

Yeah. You know, I had another project that was kind of interesting along those same lines. We were, we were flying a drone over the ditch. The pipeline was being put before backfilling after lowering in. And what we were trying to do is try to map the elevation of the top of pipe so that we weren't just kind of estimating the final grade. Right. And there was a couple of old surveyor, old pipeline surveyors there and they were like, you guys are here trying to take our jobs. And I'm like, no, I'm just applying a different way. Like used to have a steel chain and then you moved to gps. We didn't take anybody's job away. This is just another tool in the toolbox to help get better data and put in the system and people that kind of. Like I said, I think there's been a turnover in industry and technology is more widely adopted or accepted. Accepted 30 years ago.

00:37:32 KC Yost

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The word is accepted. And I think that, that, that's, that's fantastic. Look, I've enjoyed this conversation but we're running out of time so I just, just throw it out there. Is there anything else you'd like to add before I sign off?

00:37:50 Jeff Allen

No. Obviously, you know, this is a kind of a passion of mine, a career if I, if I might say, you know, really kind of focusing on, on pipeline and pipeline. JS has taken me to a lot of interesting places in the world. But I think more importantly, I've met a lot of really great people in this industry, a lot of people who care deeply about the pipeline industry and safety and running things correctly. I'm just so fortunate to be part of this industry and to be able to do two things that I love, GIS mapping and pipeline together that I could sit here and talk to you all day about it. So just appreciate the opportunity to come and chat and thank you for the great questions and, and hopefully we stirred some, some ideas in people's heads about how they can, they can use GIS and pipeline operations.

00:38:38 KC Yost

Outstanding. Outstanding. Yes. Great to have you on. It was, it was a great conversation. I truly appreciate you taking the time to visit. You're. You're a wealth of knowledge. Maybe. Maybe we'll come back and visit with you again sometime soon. I'd enjoy drill down in a couple of these areas. Yeah, great. So if anyone like to learn more about Esri's ArcGIS or other topics that Jeff's mentioned, you can find them on the web@esri.com that's E-S R I.com if you would like to learn more about the PODS association, you can find them on the web at pods.org that's P O D S.org thanks to all of you for tuning in to this episode of the Energy Pipeline Podcast sponsored by Caterpillar Oil and Gas. If you have any questions, comments or ideas for podcast topics, feel free to email me@kc yostgn.com I also want to thank everyone at the Oil and Gas Global Network for making this podcast possible. Find out more about other oggn podcasts@oggn.com this is KC Yost saying goodbye for now. Have a great week. Keep that energy flowing through the pipeline.

00:39:55 E

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