June 2016, Vol. 243, No. 6

Association News The Gas Processors Association has changed its name to GPA Midstream Association. The association has about 100 corporate members of all sizes. The GPA corporate office is located in Tulsa, OK. Wolverine Pipe Line Company was recognized for safety and environmental performance by ..

NEW HOPE, PA–“Jeff,” she whispered huskily into this sleepy head, interrupting a most pleasant dream. “Did you hear something in the room? Do you think it might be Emily?” “I really don’t know Janet,” I quietly mumbled to my jittery wife, who often awakes at the slightest touch or sound. You’d thin..

This is the projection in the report, North American Midstream Infrastructure through 2035: Leaning into the Headwinds, conducted by ICF International on behalf of the INGAA Foundation. The new study updates a 2014 infrastructure report to reflect the dynamic changes in the natural gas, NGL and crud..

Changes to the oil and gas industry in the United States have put pressure on transmission companies to optimize their systems, add flexibility and respond more quickly to a fluctuating industry landscape. While many companies in the industry have been struggling to change, others have been more for..

Partners pursuing the construction of the Constitution Pipeline say they remain steadfastly committed to pursuing the federally approved energy infrastructure project, despite the recent decision by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) to deny the Section 401 Water Qu..

The Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), the federal agency charged with administering the nation’s pipeline safety program, published a long-awaited notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) for gas transmission and gathering pipelines. Un..

Operators invest heavily in energy-delivering systems such as pipelines in order to ensure that demands of the global energy industry are met in a safe and reliable way. A pipeline has integrity when it reduces the chance of failure during operation and maintenance, and minimizes the consequential r..

Canada’s oil and gas industry should see some modest recovery between 2017-2020 due to renewed industry activity and the need to replace retiring workers, according to the Labour Market Outlook 2016-20 for Canada’s Oil and Gas Industry report, by PetroLMI, a Division of Enform. “The industry underw..

NACE Corrosion 2016, held March 6-10 in Vancouver, B.C., brought together a widely diverse representation of those involved in the coating and anti-corrosion materials fields. In all about 6,500 attendees whose interests ranged from applications for highway and bridge construction to wastewater pro..

The protection of oil, gas and refined product pipelines against natural events such as earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis, not to mention human actions including construction excavations, illegal tapping and terrorist sabotage, is an ongoing concern for operators around the world. However, in th..

Austin Hastings, director of codes, standards and training in Gas Operations for Pacific Gas and Electric Company, won the Distribution Achievement Award at the American Gas Association’s annual Operations Conference held April 21-24 in Phoenix. This prestigious award recognizes individuals who have..

If the attendance and tone of the speakers at the 12th annual Pipeline Opportunities Conference, held March 22, serves as a harbinger of what lies ahead for the energy business, things are starting to look up. About 350 participants filled the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Houston’s Galleria District to h..

Santa Cruz, CA, population 62,864, is a coastal, university enclave situated 75 miles south of San Francisco on the northern edge Monterey Bay in the southern part Northern California. A college town with a branch of the University of California and all the trappings, it also is the location for a ..

The combination of hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling technology has revolutionized domestic gas markets. Pipelines have been scrambling to expand, reconfigure and modify their systems in response. Prospective shippers, faced with these changes, benefit from an often unprecedented multitude ..

PG&E began work in September 2014 to replace two aging natural gas pipelines that cross Cache Creek near the town of Capay, CA. In September 2015, the HDD Company completed two directional drills on the project, replacing the pipeline that had been exposed on the bottom of Cache Creek. PG&E’s Line ..

In the current phase of the Pipeline Safety Enhancement Plan (PSEP), Southern California Gas Company (SoCalGas) and San Diego Gas & Electric Company (SDG&E) are testing and replacing about 175 miles of pipe and upgrading/installing over 450 shutoff valves throughout the system. There are nearly 200..

While conducting a client interview after we provided inspection services for a pipeline project, I posed this question to gain feedback: “How’d we do?” He responded with, “You are just like all of the other third-party natural gas pipeline inspection companies and inspectors. I don’t trust any of ..

PWC’s 19th Annual Global CEO Survey: Oil and gas industry key findings, details the views of 71 oil and gas CEOs in 34 countries and draws on in-depth interviews with industry leaders, John J. Christmann IV, CEO and president of the Apache Corp., U.S., and Andrew Clyde, president and CEO of Murphy U..

Recent news headlines around gas storage incidents highlight the fact that it is not only oil and gas-producing wells that need continuous real-time integrity monitoring to avoid catastrophic leaks. According to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) most recent forecasts, we can expect a sustaine..

Sometimes, the biggest problems are the ones you can’t see. Microbially Induced Corrosion (MIC) is an enormous – and expensive -problem for the oil and gas industry, directly or indirectly costing billions of dollars each year in treatment, prevention and equipment repair. Emerging technologies may..

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration issued a final rule Thursday to sharply cut methane emissions from U.S. oil and gas production, a key part of a push by President Barack Obama to reduce methane emissions by nearly half over the next decade. The rule by the Environmental Protection Agency ..

Some pipelines and onshore facilities deteriorate slowly during operation and in certain cases have been reliable for more than their estimated lifetime. Other installations, however, exhaust their useful life after only two to five years of operation. There are numerous factors that affect the lif..

Williams Partners L.P. has received Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approval for an application for Transco’s Garden State Expansion Project, a fully contracted expansion project to deliver 180,000 Dth/d of natural gas capacity for local distribution to thousands of customers in New Jers..

Two House committees passed nearly identical pipeline safety bills. Once combined into a single piece of legislation, the House will work with the Senate, which previously passed a bill, to come up with a single version for President Obama’s signature. All three bills pale beside the 2011 pipeline b..

OTC Attendance Shows Huge Dropoff Houston’s Offshore Technology Conference drew only 68,000 attendees last month, down 37% from 2014 when the 108,000 attendees set a record. Last year’s event attracted 94,700 attendees. The exhibition floor was still the third-largest in the event’s 48-year histor..

ADB Hopes TAPI Gas Line is Completed in Next Five Years The Asian Development Bank (ADB) said last month that despite security concerns, they hope the long-awaited $10 billion TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan and India) natural gas pipeline will be completed in the next five years. “All fou..

TransCanada Gets Final Permits for BC GasLink Pipeline TransCanada Corp. reported May 5 that it has secured the final permits needed to start construction and operation of its proposed Coastal GasLink pipeline. The company said the B.C. Oil and Gas Commission issued the last two of 10 permits neede..

Buy it, sit down and read The Green and the Black, The Complete Story of the Shale Revolution, the Fight over Fracking, and the Future of Energy by Gary Sernovitz,(St. Martin’s Press, 2016,. $27.99). The shale revolution prompted by the development of hydrofracking has changed the face of energy i..

At Gas Technology Institute (GTI) in the Chicago northwest suburb of Des Plaines, IL, the ubiquitous task of cutting into street pavement to make various pipeline and utility repairs and then restoring the roadway is a complex effort that has spawned much attention and research over the years. Effor..

Vericor Power Systems of Alpharetta, GA has developed a new version of the TF Series gas turbine, specifically aimed at the oil and gas market for pump, compression and portable power generation applications. The announcement was made at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston. Rated at over ..

T.D. Williamson introduces Solutions Engine, a digital research tool for pipeline owners and operators that delivers targeted answers to more than 80 integrity and throughput challenges# From mechanical damage and corrosion to tie-ins and leaking valves, pipeline owners and operators face a multitu..

McElroy McElroy has launched a new machine in its flagship TracStar® series that offers advanced emissions reduction and automation technologies allowing users to meet today’s toughest regulations in air quality and data logging. The TracStar 900 Series 2 Automatic features a Cummins US EPA Tier 4/..